Finding love

Annie Lennox sings, ‘‘Sweet dreams are made of this. Who am I to disagree? I travel the world and the seven seas. Everybody’s looking for something.’’ And I would say the something that everybody is looking for is love – for companionship, intimacy, acceptance, and affirmation in relationship with others in which we are acknowledged and received simply for who we are.

However, the tragic irony is that if our goal is to find this kind of love – God’s or anyone else’s – then we will inevitably live in fearful insecurity. This is because our minds will forever turn to our adequacy – whether we are attractive enough or good enough to win or merit the love of another. Or if we do succeed then our anxiety turns to how we may maintain what we have gained.

Now the Bible speaks of this reality telling us that ‘‘God is love’’ (1 John 4:16). Unfortunately, this has often been understood in ways that reinforce our fears. This is because it has often had its sharp radical edge blunted by treating it as ‘‘God is loving’’ thus reducing love to a mere attribute of God – something God does rather than is.

Moreover it has often been understood as a love we exist outside of and therefore our great task is to somehow find our way into it, or else exist without it.

But ‘‘God is love’’ is not simply describing some attribute of God. Rather it is describing God’s intrinsic being and essential nature – the very Godness of what and who God is!

Now if this is true this means that the thing that sits at the very origin and centre of the universe is love, and that our intrinsic human being and essential nature originates from out of this love.

It means therefore that we have been created in love, by love, and for love; and that this constitutes the whole purpose of our being – to be consciously and experientially incorporated into this love.

And so our human desire for love – this ‘‘something’’ that everybody is looking for – is not simply something peculiar about us that has nothing in external reality to correspond to.

Rather it is something that is in us because it has been hard-wired into the very fabric of our beings by the God who is love in order that we may find its fulfilment in relationship with God.

But another tragic irony in this is that when Christians have tried to communicate these things they have often given the impression (because many believe it to be true) that in our natural condition we exist outside of God’s love – that God has erected a barrier against us.

And therefore the Good News of Jesus is misunderstood to be about how God has opened a door through this barrier to allow certain individuals who profess faith to come through – and then bolts the door shut again against everyone else who doesn’t!

Now the nearest analogy we have to this is the relationship we have with our children. Our children don’t come into the world behind a bolted door we have erected that separates them from our love.

And nor is their great task to find and win our love by making themselves attractive or good enough for us to open a door to them.

Rather they come into the world already surrounded by our love and their great task (and ours also) is that as they grow and develop they become aware of, learn to trust as true, and enter into the love that already surrounds them in real and genuinely relational ways.

And so it is with God. The Good News of Jesus Christ is that God has obliterated and destroyed all barriers and bolted doors against relationship with God. And therefore any barriers that remain are ones that we have erected from our side. But from God’s side God wants us to know that we are already enfolded within God’s eternal loving kindness – and that this is true whether we know and accept it, or not.

And so what this means is that our great task is not to try to find love, but to awaken to the reality that love has already found us – and that God invites us to participate in this love in conscious and experiential ways.