Love is who God is.
Readings for the 6th Sunday of Easter
Have you ever been so hurt that you intentionally close down and sulk? Have you ever willfully chosen to isolate yourself as a passive-aggressive way of punishing family? I did just the other night. I got angry at my family for asking me to watch my television show somewhere else. Now, I am not quite sure why I got so mad, but I said, “I’m really pissed” at all of them and stormed upstairs. I got so wrapped up in my anger that I disconnected myself from my loved ones. This, I think, is a small, insignificant example of what it is like to shut ourselves off from love. Today, Jesus says, “Whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him.”
Even though it took me all night to get over myself, my wife never stopped loving me. She is a beautiful example of how God loves us just as we are, even when we’re acting like spoiled brats. Meister Eckhart asks, “How has God loved us? He loved us when we were not, and when we were His foes. God needs our friendship so much that He cannot wait for us to pray to Him: He approaches us and begs us to be His friends, for He desires of us that we should want His forgiveness.” God loves us even when we separate ourselves from the divine mystery. God loves us even when we spiritually close ourselves off from divine love. Perhaps it is especially when we do something monumentally stupid or grandiosely selfish that God reaches out to us in mercy. As Eckhart says, “God likes to forgive big sins better than small ones. The bigger they are, the more freely and quickly he forgives them.”
Love is who God is. The Meister is quite clear about this. “What is God’s love? His essence and his being – that is his love.” Eckhart preaches, “Love is quite pure, quite bare, quite detached in itself. The greatest masters say that the love with which we love is the Holy Spirit…in all the motion with which we are moved to love, we are moved by nothing but the Holy Spirit. Love at its purest and most detached is nothing but God.” Love is the Holy Spirit, and so the love with which God loves the divine self is the very love that God showers upon us. It is the Holy Spirit. God delights in nothing so much as giving away this Holy Spirit to any who are open and willing. Eckhart preaches like a musical refrain how much God likes to give large gifts: “God does not like to give anything as much as big gifts.” The biggest gift God takes pleasure in giving is the divine self: the very life, essence, and love of God.
This God of love is one with each of us. This God “is not farther off than the door of your heart; there he stands and tarries and waits to find someone ready to open up to him and let him in. You don’t need to call him from afar; he can scarcely wait for you to open to him. He longs for you a thousand times more than you long for him.” God yearns for us to love back. Therefore, Eckhart tells us to “love nothing but goodness and God.” He says we are to love God only for God, not for any reward or to secure anything from God like we might seek something from a magic Genie. Further, Eckhart emphatically states loving God is not like loving a person because all too often we treat people as objects of our love. God is not an object, so Eckhart says, “You should love him as he is a non-God, a non-spirit, a non-person, a non-image, but as he is a pure, unmixed bright ‘One,’ separated from all duality; and in that One we should eternally sink down, out of something into nothing.” Loving God by sinking into nothingness, by detachment, is how we respond to the pure gratuity of divine love, which is ever-ready to forgive and pour out the divine life upon us. As we love God in nothingness, our hearts open more and more to this transcendent life.
Such amazing love is at the heart of the Resurrection. It was God’s superabundant love that raised Jesus from the dead. Just so, it is God’s love that waits for us to die to self, to detach in Eckhart’s vocabulary, in order to be raised into newness of life. Love transforms us. Whoever accepts divine love, Eckhart preaches, “will attain more and thereby come further than through all the penitential practices and mortification that all the people together could carry out. They will even be able to bear and endure happily whatever befalls them and whatever God inflicts upon them. They will be able to forgive in a kindly way all the evil that is done to them. Nothing brings you nearer to God and so unites you to him as this sweet bond of love.” Love is the very life of the Resurrection.