Love: Week 1
Our Foundation is Love
Sunday, December 27, 2015
In the coming year of Daily Meditations I will be exploring a theme close to all of us—Love. (Click here to watch a short video introduction.) The most powerful, most needed, and most essential teaching is always about Love. Love is our foundation and love is our destiny. It is where we come from and where we’re headed. As St. Paul famously says, “So faith, hope, and love remain, but the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13).
My hope, whenever I speak or write, is to help clear away the impediments to receiving, allowing, trusting, and participating in a foundational Love. God’s love is planted inside each of us as the Holy Spirit who, according to Jesus, “will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you” (John 14:26). Love is who you are.
All I can do is remind you of what you already know deep within your True Self and invite you to live connected to this Source. John the Evangelist writes, “God is love, and whoever remains in love, remains in God and God in him [and her]” (1 John 4:16). The Judeo-Christian creation story says that we were created in the very “image and likeness” of God—who is love (Genesis 1:26; see also Genesis 9:6). Out of the Trinity’s generative, loving relationship, creation takes form, mirroring its Creator.
We have heard this phrase so often that we don’t get the existential shock of what “created in the image and likeness of God” is saying about us. If we could believe it, we would save ourselves ten thousand dollars in therapy! If this is true—and I believe it is—our family of origin is divine. It is saying that we were created by a loving God to be love in the world. Our core is original blessing, not original sin. Our starting point is positive and, as it is written in the first chapter of the Bible, it is “very good” (Genesis 1:31). We do have a good place to go home. If the beginning is right, the rest is made considerably easier, because we know and can trust the clear direction of our life’s tangent.
The great illusion we must all overcome is the illusion of separateness. It is the primary task of religion to communicate not worthiness but union, to reconnect people to their original identity “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). The Bible calls this state of separateness “sin.” God’s job description is to draw us back into this primal and intimate relationship. “My dear people, we are already children of God; what we will be in the future has not yet been fully revealed, and all I do know is that we shall be like God” (1 John 3:2).
Gateway to Silence:
God’s life is living itself in me.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2007), 27-28, 29.
