What does it mean when we say God loves us? What does loving God or loving people mean, in a spiritual or religious sense? Let’s start with the Oxford English Dictionary.
I.1.a A feeling or disposition of deep affection or fondness for someone, typically arising from a recognition of attractive qualities, from natural affinity, or from sympathy and manifesting itself in concern for the other’s welfare and pleasure in his or her presence; great liking, strong emotional attachment; (similarly) a feeling or disposition of benevolent attachment experienced towards a group or category of people, and (by extension) towards one’s country or another impersonal object of affection.
I.2. In religious use: the benevolence and affection of God towards an individual or towards creation; (also) the affectionate devotion due to God from an individual; regard and consideration of one human being towards another prompted by a sense of a common relationship to God.
I.3. Strong predilection, liking, or fondness (for something); devotion (to something).
I.4.a. An intense feeling of romantic attachment based on an attraction felt by one person for another; intense liking and concern for another person, typically combined with sexual passion.
I.4.b. An instance of being in love.
I.4.c. The motif of romantic love in imaginative literature.
I.5. Sexual desire or lust, esp. as a physiological instinct; amorous sexual activity, sexual intercourse.
I.6.a. A person who is beloved of another, esp. a sweetheart; also (rare) in extended use of animals.
I.6.b. As a form of address to one’s beloved and (in modern informal use) also familiarly to a close acquaintance or (more widely) anyone whom one encounters. Frequently with possessive adjective.
I.6.d. An object of love; a person who or thing which is loved, the beloved (of); a passion, preoccupation.
I.6.e. A charming or delightful person or thing.
I.7.a. The personification of romantic or sexual affection, usually portrayed as masculine, and more or less identified with the Eros, Amor, or Cupid of Classical mythology (formerly sometimes feminine, and capable of being identified with Venus).
As we can see above, love has lots of meanings. I have excluded from the above certain extensions of meanings irrelevant to our
purpose, senses to do with games of chance, a zero score in tennis, etc., and
senses in particular compounds or phrases.
We are essentially left with six meanings:
- A feeling of affection and fondness
- God’s affectionate benevolence reciprocated by affectionate devotion to God and others
- Predilection
- Romantic attachment.
- Sexual desire and conduct
- That which is loved
We can dispense with 6. We are interested here in the state, not the object of mental processes whilst in that state. We can dispense from 4 and 5, although, with 4, there are examples in the literature of the love of God being equated with romantic love (in both directions), which need not detain us, as it is a particular, local manifestation of the love or a metaphor for it, not the thing itself.
To examine 3, here are two exemplifying quotations:
His love for his old hospital, like one’s affection for the youthful homestead, increased steadily with the length of time he had been shot of it.
Marina’s interest in gypsies was part of her love of everything exotic.
The objects here (the hospital, the exotic) are on one hand material entities and on the other hand an abstract quality shared by material entities. However, our question concerns the spiritual, not the material, and we are concerned also with the universal not the specific: these loves are the highly selected preference, the nail that catches the jersey, the flotsam in an indifferent sea, the birthmark on the otherwise flawless skin. They are the quirks of personality, the differentiating features of the individual. They are not the manifestation of God's universal ocean of love towards His universe and towards us, as favoured entities within it.
We are left, therefore, with 1 and 2.
1 is used chiefly in relation to the human or the animal, e.g.
He was counting practically, and man-fashion, on her love for her children.
There wasn’t much about Lang Bolton you’d call human except his love for a black and white cow-dog named Rounder.
A second theme running through the examples given is exemplified
here:
The two seminal and ineradicable loves of any individual human being are the love of God and the love of one’s native country.
The love of one’s native country can be seen as an affection, an attachment, and a loyalty, in relation to one thing (one’s native country) over another (other countries). This very well betrays the very personal nature of the forms of love under 1. I love these things because they are mine.
This sense of love is one of personal attachment, originating in the individual, and taking the form, at base, of sentimental ownership. Loving Susan, Spot, England, and God are thus placed on the same level: the elements of a portfolio of love, each jostling for our attention, the pallet with which we are painting, the luggage we have packed for the journey. They start with us and are about us. We love our country because it is where we were born. We love our children because they are our children. We love our dog because he is our dog. We love God because He is our God. This love is the love for those elements of the universe that reflect self back to self. The love of God in this sense is therefore really the return of a flattering compliment.
This is to be contrasted with sense 2, which starts with
God and is reciprocated back to God and replicated out towards others. It is not a personal compliment; it is a universal, non-selective radiance. To reiterate:
the benevolence and affection of God towards an individual or towards creation; (also) the affectionate devotion due to God from an individual; regard and consideration of one human being towards another prompted by a sense of a common relationship to God.
Let us examine the notion of affection, first. Some people
are very affectionate and warm by nature; indeed, some people’s being consists
in little else. Others are granted a more sparing, maybe even homeopathic, dose
of affection as part of their natural make-up. Some are all sentiment. Others are
nauseated by it. To predicate a spiritual or religious life on the
accommodation, fostering, and outpouring of a particular sentiment might
firstly be toothless in the sense of achieving nothing in practice other than a
passing warmth in the apprehending object of that affection (but only in those
likewise predisposed towards sentimentality) and would secondly be grossly
unfair to those endowed only with thimblefuls of this faculty. Spend your weekly
shilling wisely, child! Affection cannot be the core of this love. I will come
back to affection later, but for now it is shelved.
This leaves us with benevolence and devotion.
Benevolence is well-wishing and well-willing, in the sense
of converting the wishes into actions. In the same way that ‘thoughts and prayers’
are a stationary vehicle, in the absence of the practical plans (the destination),
the resources to achieve those plans (the fuel), and the action to implement
those plans (the actual driving), benevolence, to be more than sentiment, must
be backed up by action.
God’s love of us, therefore, is not simply wishing us well then
turning away to attend to a jigsaw puzzle or folding laundry. It is active
intervention and involvement. The universe is not a cuckoo-clock that has been
wound up and left to run down (as cuckoo as much of it might appear to its denizens)
but a far more complex interaction of natural laws (established by God), human
will (permitted by God), active engagement by God, and interaction between
people and God. There are forces outside the billiard table picking up cues and
acting on it. The passage of the world is not a fait accompli.
God’s love of us is therefore not the distant well-wishing
of a senile grandparent: God is the garrulous interlocutor with the ever-guiding
hand. God is concerned, present, and active. He is not only the Creator of the
theatre and the Writer of the play but He is on the stage Himself.
What about the response, the devotion? Devotion can be sentimental
but has a far more practical sense:
To give up, addict, apply zealously or exclusively (to a pursuit, occupation, etc., or to a particular purpose); esp. reflexive to devote oneself.
The object of this devotion has two elements: that which is
given up and that which takes its place.
To devote oneself is to therefore to give up self and have
the resulting vacuum filled with something.
What is giving up self?
Abandoning personal ambitions and objectives; self-originated
plans and schemes; any notion of self-image; any projection of that self-image
into the minds of others and any preoccupation therewith; primary concern for
the material.
What is substituted?
The affairs of God, embodied not in abstract ruminations about
the loveliness of God or how splendid God thinks one is, but the business of God
in this world: the performance of God’s will, every moment of every day.
Let’s return briefly to what it means to have God love us,
which is what enables this devotion: willing the good of something or someone
is not indifferently leaving it to its own devices. Love, in this sense, is not
nice. The rosebush, if it could talk, would likely not relish the merciless
pruning. Human suffering, vicissitudes, trials, travails, and hardships are the
equivalent: our good lies not in indolence, in fattening ourselves up, in
indulging passions and whims like senseless, reactive chemicals, forming bonds
with whatever proximate substances we have a chemical affinity. It involves the
pruning away of most of what we think makes up our being in order that the
remainder be trained and channelled towards the performance of specific work
for God. To be loved is not to be a spoiled child but to be submitted to a gruelling
process of transformation. What is worse: the ingredients of that
transformation, the suffering, vicissitudes, trials, travails, and hardships,
are coming down the tubes anyway, regardless of whether we recognise them as
artefacts of a physical existence or the fire in the sofa causing us to leap
out of self-indulgence into vigorous and directed action. We can burn in that
hell or live a God-devoted life: the choice is ours.
I promised I would return to affection. If the decision is
made to abandon oneself and give one’s life to God, in response to God’s love
for us, there will be moments of affection. These might join up into pools and
seas of affection or might not: that is a matter of temperament and grace. But
the lack of such affection need not be an undue concern. What is required of
the individual is the concerted action of a devoted life. The sentiment will
then take care of itself.