A thing that has helped this click for me that these forces are the same was a simple story that our rector told in his forum a week and a half ago (which I’m probably going to slaughter!) Anyways, while the group from our church was visiting the Roman Catholic church in Italy that is living into this teaching, a woman there got up and gave a testimony. She said that one day she was having an argument with her husband and she therefore wanted to distance herself from him. But instead because of this teaching, she decided to turn towards Love.
Is all love in this world God then? I had a friend in college who told me that at one time he thought that since God is love, he was going to have sex with as many women as possible!! Fortunately he quickly realized the fallacy of this argument!!
In Called to Love, the authors quote John Paul’s The Jeweler’s Shop where the Jeweler explains the difference between the loves in the world and Love that is God:
The thing is that love carries people away like an absolute, although it lacks absolute dimensions. But acting under an illusion, they do not try to connect that love with the Love that has such a dimension. They do not even feel the need, blinded as they are.” (JS, 88) In encountering each other, Adam and Eve encounter “the Love that has the dimension of the Absolute.” (p. 69)We do encounter the transcendent God through the God-given routes of marriage and friendships with others. “What God has joined together, let no one separate” (Matt 19:6). God joins, and God leaves His fingerprints all over the union when He does. But not all want to recognize these fingerprints as His.
Adam and Eve are seized by an anxious fear of God. This fear generates in its turn the temptation to seal their love off from the Creator and to elevate it into an “absolute” apart from him. The result is an exclusive focus on each other, a self-contained couplehood isolated from the Source (and also from the rest of the world). (p. 113)The world’s tendency is to worship the experience of love outside of Love Himself.
Here’s two more examples. Why was God so specific in His instructions for the construction of the tabernacle and for the temple? Certain materials had to be used in certain dimensions in certain ways, right? This is because the temple was a model of the heavenlies. It effectuated the path to the true God. Likewise, our worship, our liturgy, can’t be done however we choose. The Jewish people thought they could worship the “gods who led them up out of the land of Egypt” by making and worshiping a golden calf and in their chosen “festival to the LORD,” and we know how that turned out (Ex. 32). Worshiping that statue would not lead them to the God who did lead them out of Egypt.
Like the directions given for temple worship, to enter into where the glory is—to dwell with holy, mysterious, beautiful Love Himself—there are only certain ways that will get us there and God in His mercy has shown us what they are. Our experience of the true Love must be done in a specific ways to actually meet with Him and not a counterfeit, a false or an immature form of love. The temple is to God as love is to Love. The Israelites could experience God in the temple properly constructed, and we can experience Love in love properly constructed.
The search for God and the search for Love have the same journeys and ends in Christ. We will discover the Perfect Love as we seek Him and find Him through the paths He’s given to us. God gives us the choice to turn towards Love in relationships or live isolated, lonely, and possibly even destructive lives. We do encounter the God of love in our bonds with others, especially spouses and children; may God give us kingdom eyes to see Him there.
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