On the Love of God
Whether married or single, we must all come to terms with our dependency on the love of God.
It is something we know in our minds from day one of conversion, but to know it in our souls, to live that truth in fear and trembling, is a constant submission of self-will to God’s will. God always has the perfect timing and means of bringing the ever deeper understanding of this idea about— whether through marriage, wherein we discover that our spouse is unable to fill that great vacuum in our hearts, or through singleness, as the absence of a spouse forces us to depend utterly on Him. Or more precisely, it forces us to recognize that we already do, must, and have always depended utterly on Him. The gauzy veils of self-deceit are rent from top to bottom.
For the past five years I have served at my local crisis pregnancy center. Pregnancy means sex and sex means relationships. Whenever I interacted with the clients and sometimes their boyfriends or husbands, I was struck by a common thread that ran through all of their lives: a desperate grasping for love. But it’s not just in the world or in the poor of spirit that I see it. Oh! It is in my very own inconstant soul. On Valentine’s Day, I composed this reflection as much for myself as for all.
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We want to wrap ourselves up in this word, and for all that it seems a blanket too small. We seek to clothe ourselves in it, yet feel exposed. We try to warm ourselves by its fire, but leave chilled. Like the medieval hunt for the hart, it always seems just beyond our horizon in the disappearing point. Can we pull it from moonbeams? Is it ordered in the stars? Is it carved in youth’s fancy into tree bark or into our skin? Is it pressed into coal, clear and coruscating? We try lovers, roses, morning dew, promises, rubies and rings and find them all wanting. Above all we tear a sharpened claw into our own chests and discover, as we always suspected, that there lies a cavernous heart. We want, we want; we try to pluck it from films and books and scores and poems with a desperate grasping; we drag it from our lover’s mouth and from our friend’s embrace.
And yet, and yet so perfectly offered on the cross, complete and whole, lacking all wagers and demands, freely given—this rich, rich gift, dearly bought.
Many have embraced a counterfeit love, a barbed lie, a bated hook. How I wish to share with you this undying love, this unchanging love, this unbreakable love, that truly comforts, that clothes in strength and dignity, that warms, that does not expire or exhaust, that is the mightiest in the mightiest, that comes in still small whispers. He, who seeing us dirty and naked and abandoned, covers us with His wing, anoints us with oil, adorns us in gold and in silk.
And we, knowing this: can we love Him less? Does your heart not burst in joy and in sorrow to be loved so greatly—that loving us cost Him so great a price? Do we not tremble in His presence perceiving but failing to understand His great love for us? This agape that burns us free from our loneliness and toil, our suffering and hate is the only way to wrapped up in light and in fire and in smoke and in Holy Ghost and in LOVE.
