The Love Story: an Exploration
[“I only know that I did not know what love was until I encountered one that kept opening and opening and opening. And until I acknowledged that what that love was opening onto, and into, was God” (Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, 2013).
[“But now faith, hope, love abide these three; but the greatest of these is Love” (Agápe; I Cor 13:13).]
[“God is Love” (Agápe; I Jn 4:8,16; EA).]
O Lover,
How is it that we humans can be drawn into You who are Love Itself? What are the contours of such a trek? In this prayer to You I seek to respond to these questions autobiographically aware that each of our journeys differs.
From the perch of the present it appears that my earliest memories were slaked with a pre-logical sense of wonder: e.g., the loving care and stability of family, especially as experienced with my mother; the agrarian seasonal symphony; rural flora and fauna; crimson solstice sunsets bleeding into the mystérium treméndum of the night sky. During my mostly healthy childhood I explored freely, imagining widely and wildly, and was not an alien to awe. I do not recall this pattern of wandering and wondering as closely knit to the seemingly formulaic prayers often heard in my family and congregation.
As I moved through and then beyond my teens a combine of new influences unfolded: e.g., the tempestuousness of adolescence, ego-emergence, a series of educational settings leaning toward the cognitive. That in time I opted toward theological studies did not impede the growing primacy of intellect and the lure of achievement in this person closeting insecurity. My own understanding of love in this phase continued to be shaped by self-interest and romance with but vague linkage with You.
However, despite this developmental self-absorption, the first half of my life, viewed in retrospect, did contain numerous and varied healthy experiences of love: nature, faith community, friendships, beauty (especially music), substantive conversation. All of these loves, while sometimes neglected for their own sake, were also emerging tutorials into less effable depths which elicited wonder within me. Throughout the first half of my life—active, adventuresome, advancing—I remained a titular theist, but one hobbled by its distance, episodically haunted by angst of judgment, both blessed and cursed by my idealistic bent. The issues of the first half of my life as a spiritual being would continue to shape significantly the second half.
In these last thirty-five years I have increasingly found words like translucent, diaphanous, and abyssal to reference layered dimensions of love deeper than sense, thought or affection can reach. And intermittently I have been nudged toward You as the commonality, the depth, the luminosity of all of these loves, indeed You as Love Itself. The mystics of two millennia of the Jesus community have both illuminated and embodied that it is so. The disposition of You set forth in their “minority report” has provided invitation, direction, reassurance, and examples as my own journey unfolded. In all of this I was now marveling more than cogitating, being drawn to the mystic more than the theistic.
So, O Lover, what more can this trekker say—one both embodying such a pedigree and aspiring to embrace You as Love Itself? First, I would point to Your penchant for union. Everywhere in Your being and works there is a gravity-like pattern of relational reciprocity within a larger convergence toward theósis (“deification”). This pattern reflects who You intrinsically are, infinitely outstripping the jurisdictions of ontology, cosmogenesis, eschatology and the like. Thus each of our natural loves is both grounded in, and harbinger of, this Your unítas. Paul’s “all in all” (I Cor 15:20-28), Hadewijch’s “Totality,” Cynthia Bourgeault’s “interabiding” (Jn 15:4-11) and Richard Rohr’s journal Oneing point to this theme in various ways. You are both Source of all and Télos within the kósmos You are ever drawing to Yourself. Your unitive bent is expressive of “the arc of the universe,” to use the phrase of Dr. King.
Second, Your Love, fruition of all of our loves, is intrinsic balm restorative and beyond. The phrase Tikkún Olám (“repairing the universe”), its roots in the Talmudic and Kabbalah traditions, is prophetic injunction precisely because it points to who You are. The Hebraic reading “And the Lord God will wipe tears away from all faces” (Is 25:8) surfaces several times in the Christian Apocalypse (7:17, 21:4). To address You as Love Itself, as “Lover,” is to revere You as “Mender” of all things, neither the past nor death excluded. Everything touched by You, O Timeless One, is being nudged toward wholeness. Our destiny is transformational fire—a la Juan’s “The Living Flame of Love”—not cinder.
Finally, Love of Your sort is, to draw on Wiman, ever “opening and opening and opening”: opening to the omni-layered translucence and ubiquitous interconnectedness of the cosmos; opening to the uncharted depths of our human personhood; opening to You as “Bright Abyss” for whom we often find no expression other than Your own “groaning” on our behalf (Rom 8:26). Amid our cul-de-sacs of spirit, our self-comforting and -protecting miniaturizing of You, our myopic visions, our closed systems, Your Love is continually inviting toward, and drawing us into, Yourself, Your uncharted Divine Life. Variously intimated by our sundry loves, whether laudable or tawdry, You are the paradigmatic Lover ever whispering “All is open. Come. . . .”
Three of the innumerable surfaces of the crystal of You who are Love Itself: union, transformative fire, opening. Dóxa!
