NEW YEAR REFLECTION — free as the sky

1 John 4:7-8, ESV

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

Wherever God is, there is love. Wherever love is, there is God. Whoever knows love knows God. Whoever knows God knows love.

What then is love? Love is, first of all, seeing the beloved of God in others and otherness. This belovedness can also be described as the glory or the original goodness in all things. Thomas Merton captured it this way, “It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven.” Richard Rohr calls this “immortal diamond.” The pure and immortal diamond in us is seeing the pure and immortal diamond in others. It is Christ in us seeing the Christ in others.

Then, as we are seeing, we are drawn to be united. Seeing leads to seeking union. This desire to be united is innate and instinctive for we are from God. As the goal of our earthly life is to be united with God who created us in His image and likeness, we are to experience union with God as we experience union with others. Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane highlights beautifully what is a main thrust of the entire Book of John, pursuing union with God.

It is precisely this pursuit of union with others that requires persistent and sacrificial work of compassionate service, dying to false self, listening, learning, unlearning, and relearning. The “work” here is not merely work for work's sake, but the work or the effort that is really God’s grace at work to pursue union with others which somehow culminates into union with God. I use the word somehow because I don’t understand how it happens but it happens.

My pursuit of being in union with my wife is the richest example I can think of. The Bible is replete with this earthly union because it comes closest to what humans can experience and project those experiences to being in union with God. Through multiple broken trusts, both small and big, and normal life’s challenges and problems, we have come to recognize cumulatively that we have grown in union with each other. We have come to know how one thinks, why one thinks the way I or she does, and finish each other’s heart renderings and thought processes. We have also come to know each other’s emotions, perhaps even before we know what is going on in us and proceed to utter clearly. Though clearly different and distinctive human beings, we experientially know what it means to be in union more now than when we first got married more than 30 years ago.

So then my working definition of love can be summed as both the intent and will to see the Christ in others and to do the hard work of pursuing union.

John of the Cross said that “love produces likeness.” As people embrace and practice love, love grows and multiplies like wildfire, consuming everything in its path and generating God DNA all over the world. This would be nothing short of a fulfillment of a vision Jesus laid out in John 13:34-35, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”