More than we know:
Garvey, John
OF SEVERAL MIMPS John Garvey MORE THAN WE KNOW GOD CANNOT NOT LOVE US There can be an overemphasis on feeling and emotion in religion; but on the other hand there can be too little. It is not...
...The contrast between that faith and my own was like the difference between a fire and the blue bead at the end of a wick just before the flame dies...
...Faith no doubt includes that hope, but the faith Jesus tells us about, the faith that moves mountains, is clearly something more than this...
...I once met someone who, I believe, had that kind of faith...
...But I think of Jesus: weeping at the death of Lazarus, or when "his soul was filled with dismay and dread" at Gethsemane...
...The love of God is transforming-both our love, and God's...
...I think of a friend whose wife's suffering is a source of suffering for him as well, and perhaps sometimes a source of fear...
...Maybe...
...Isn't it true, though, that "perfect love casts out fear...
...Scripture may tell us that "love is stronger than death," but much of the ferocity of love has precisely to do with the fear that the beloved may be lost...
...When religion is reduced to an acknowledgment of a certain set of facts, it is as dead as a marriage which is merely a contract...
...a steady attentiveness...
...Though the metaphors we have for God and our relationship to God are only a beginning, they point us in the right direction...
...an emotion of great warmth at the thought of the beloved...
...It is important, however, for us to know that this love, even at its most intensely felt, is only the beginning of our potential for responding, and we are meant to be much more than we allow ourselves to imagine...
...Of course my love for my children, for anyone, is far from perfect...
...The ambivalence of the phrase "the love of God," which can mean God's love for us or our love for God, reminds me of Meister Eckhart's statement: "The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me...
...a willingness to accept the otherness of the beloved...
...For us, faith comes down to a hope, sometimes a thin one, that these things are true, and that we will ultimately know this to be the case...
...elves to imagine...
...The fact that the ways we talk about the God revealed to us in Christ and by Christ-as Father, as bridegroom, as husband of the church-reflect aspects of our own experience as parents and husbands and wives can be seen as showing how limited metaphors can be, even where they point us in the right direction...
...Any compassion at all, no matter how murky, reflects and participates in the love of God...
...It was an encouraging experience because until that meeting I wasn't aware that this kind of faith is a real human possibility, except in a relatively detached and abstract way...
...or the reciprocation is so primary and all-enveloping that we cannot see it...
...It precedes our love-the Word is there, in the beginning-and gives it birth and form...
...The love of God-both God's love for us and our love for God-is in some ways the same and in other ways radically different from what we usually mean by the word...
...Certainly the fact that we call God our father has to do not only with our dependence on God, our source in God, but also with the helpless love parents have for their children: God cannot not love us...
...And feelings are often involved in what we mean by love because few of us, thinking of those to whom we are bound by whatever it is we mean by love (thinking, for example, of a lover or of our children), feel no emotion at all...
...It may not feel as intense as the love which includes fear for the beloved and the fear of losing the beloved, and we may confuse this lack of anxiety with a coolness toward God...
...Our willingness to trust, to love in the dark after reason and caution give up, is answered by God...
...Jesus asks, "When the Son of Man returns, will he find faith on earth...
...Some marriages do exist that way, but they are not in a profound sense really marriages...
...Our lack of a wholehearted response is a way of hedging our bets, thus we live in an attenuated relationship with God-from our side...
...a willingness, one that transcends desire, to accept or bring about what is best for the beloved, even where it conflicts with our own desires or interests...
...We are transformed by loving someone we cannot imagine, by trusting someone we cannot comprehend, by following the clues which reveal a universe created in love, and making the decision that those clues mean something that matters more than the series of clues that point to a meaningless universe, or a universe in which meaning is something humans find, and nothing more, a universe where, in the beginning, there was no Word...
...The answer is given before our question...
...When Paul compares the relationship of Christ and the church to a marriage, he does not mean a legal contract, but a relationship that involves cherishing, an experience of loving and being loved...
...The tragedy is that our response, which is something different from our feelings about God or our relationship to God, is so cold and half-hearted...
...Love means the desire to be with the beloved...
...I wouldn't know, personally, because I can't think of one of my children suffering, without fear for that child...
...Our ordinary loves are an important part of this...
...If a word's ambivalence can sometimes serve us, in this case it can also be profoundly misleading, at least in one sense...
...Orpheus pursues Eurydice into the realm of death precisely because of this...
...But they can also reveal how shallowly we know our own experience, which is meant to be transformed and deepened as we grow in faith...
...and just as our experience of a relationship with someone else can and will change over the years, a relationship with God, if it is alive, changes...
...But perhaps this is not obviously reciprocated...
...There is something in us that wants to experience the love of God the way we experience the love of someone dear to us, a spouse or child or close friend, but some of what we feel about those loves has to do with their fragility and imper-manence...
...A word as rich as "love" can and ought to mean a number of things...
...The love we have honestly for God would not be like this, because this relationship, one in which the beloved may be taken from us or leave us, is not true of God.The love we have for God can feel different from other loves because of this...
...They are certainly not what marriage is meant to be...
...Some part of what we think of as love is fear, fear for the beloved, and fear that the beloved will be taken from us, and there is a consequent grasping...
...It is this answering that makes our love possible...
...It is not wrong of us to expect to have some experience of what it means to have faith, to love God, to be loved by God...
...the word can mean any or all of these things...
...God's love, we trust, transforms us as well...
Vol. 116 • November 1989 • No. 20
