All the love that we feel is not God, but we all feel, all the time, the love that is God.
To expound on my statement above, I am beginning with the revelation that the fundamental nature and essence of God is love. However, as I state, not all that we feel, experience, or name “love” is in fact the love that God is. While God is love, not all we think or believe to be love, is really God.
For instance, we may have longings, desires, and loves which are very strong and real, but those may be misaligned, misdirected, and flawed. If we love ourselves in a way which supersedes our love for others, then our self-love is not the love that is God, which has the essence of loving our neighbor as ourselves.
Despite that fact that all which we think of as love is not God, the true uncreated love that is God is what we all feel all the time, even if we recognize it only some of the time. Our love is not to be equated with God, but conversely, our love, even when flawed, is not disassociated from God himself.
Because God is love, that is, the real and genuine relationality that every human language is trying to name even when defining love in some lesser fashion, we do have an inkling of what we are feeling and seeking. Our compass is pointed toward something we may not define well, but is the love that is God. This is exactly how we have all experienced the love that is God, in the taste of something that makes us long for more.
God is love, and when we sense some form of that eternal love, it is God in us, through us, for us, and from without, drawing us into the movement of his own delight. Every instance of kindness, patience, caring, selflessness, longing, generosity, mercy, and even sexual desire, which is longing for oneness, is related to and consists to some degree in the uncreated and eternal that we call “God”.
By looking within ourselves we may find the image in which we were created. We are naturally creatures of love. We long to love and to be loved. We innately desire to be like God, and find our fulfillment in our Source.
We exist out of love, and will only find our true and contented self through becoming expressions of the ground of our being. Our God is love as a verb much more than a noun, always moving and animating, becoming and expressing. As we become through faith, and faith itself is love which risks, the living embodiments of that infinite moving, we find joy, peace, and hope in life.
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