God is love! Jesus loves me, this I know not just because the Bible tells me so, but because I experience that love all the time! As I said when I returned from sabbatical, writing on a novel about Jesus’ life was the unexpected catalyst to spend fresh time with the depth and breadth of the truth that has been central to my life for as long as I can remember.

To reduce the experience, "God is love" and "Jesus loves me" to prose or poetry, theology or philosophy misses the reality that Divine love is

• long on mystery and
• mercifully zeroes-out dogma –

mystery: we’ll likely never know the fullness of love, but we keep letting it open our hearts and to the unfolding mystery that it is; and love has no need of doctrine and dogma, theology and confessions, books of order, rules and regulations!

We have no mastery and control over love, love is that to which we give ourselves in peaceful surrender -- an act of faith.
When we know and are present to God’s love our lives are changed:

• a certain tranquility enfolds us;

• rather than being overcome by worry about the path to be taken or anxious about a particular outcome, we move through every circumstance trusting that love

* is the way, that it is our constant companion, and
* whatever the outcome, we trust that love can ultimately prevail;

 

• against every instinct, when we release our need to be in control, love to casts out fear, allowing us to be fully alive and present in the moment, and to know that God is also fully present!

* control is an illusion and lots of us live with illusion covering for our fear and desire for power. Illusions of control cast long shadows over the presence of Divine love and our ability to be love.

When we stop treating them as opposites and begin experiencing Divine love and human love as a seamless progression, we will answer that unceasing longing in our hearts to be one with God.

With the union of Divine and human love, comes the transformative experience that love is for every season of life, not just for the blissful or joyous or transcendental moments. No! Love in every season, every circumstance, every relationship, and every trial or tribulation.

In the difficult and challenging seasons of life so many believers are conditioned by generations of well-meaning but completely misleading teachings to demand of God, "Why, Lord, why?" It is a familiar refrain in my studies of the Nazi era. I hear it in the very real pain that comes with tragic news, loss and grief, trials and troubles. It may be a very human thing to demand of God considering the magnitude of such events, but it is something we must resist. Doesn’t such thinking come from turning God into a parent-figure whom we rely on to fix it, protect me, comfort me? Resist that God because you cannot be intimate with that God – there is constant need to differentiate. Doesn’t this thinking also come from flawed theology and draconian dogma that only distances us from Divine presence; from the very love that is trying to draw us in!

Many faithful people, when challenged or pushed to the extreme, feel compelled by a curious kind of theology to ask God, "Why did you let this happen?"

A theology that asks that question reduces the Divine to a celestial puppeteer who controls existence and I assume those who think that way are prepared for God’s question in response, "I beg your pardon! How could you let this happen?"

In the harsh, capricious, and inhumane world of POW camps, facing the threat of death or transfer to a worse camp, Messiaen, a devout Christian with deep roots in mysticism did not ask "Why, Lord, Why?" or "How could you let this happen to me at the pinnacle of my creative career?"

On the contrary, he used this hauntingly beautiful, deeply serene composition to proclaim to the world of POWs and Nazis captors, "Lord, I love you." The power of this antithetically quiet apocalyptical work is how it inspires the experience of love, grace, and Divine presence that are not reserved for some sweet, glorious by-and-by, but are, even more, the gifts that sustain us in the routines and tribulations of daily life. Messiaen gave love, faith, creativity, and God the final word in the face of extraordinary danger.

Sometimes, in tough seasons of life, our experience of love is overwhelmed; love is hard to feel, hard to keep, and hard to give. So often tragedy shrinks the spaciousness of the human heart.

As a pastor in such times my mind goes back to St. Paul’s words, "Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. It is, in fact, the one thing that still stands when all else has fallen."²  When our backs are against the wall, we do have limits to love’s endurance and the fading of trust and hope. So what are we saying here?

 
I am here talking not about our ability to love in times of eclipse and trial, but of the generous capacity of Divine love to hold us in such hard times, times when we do not even know we are held or loved.

I Corinthians 13:8 is about how God’s love is when we live at the edge. It is my deeply personal and my pastoral experience that in tough times, we are held in Divine love

• until a holy radiance, in the soul’s good time, casts it light against fear or grief,
• until a creative spark is ready, gradually or suddenly, to rekindle the poetry of the soul,
• until the heart and mind, in their own healing time, begin to be free again.
 

The love of God and the God of love never abandon us, but neither will they grasp at us. They hold themselves out to us until we are ready or able to embrace them again, and...

in that moment of embrace the inseparable unity of God and human is no longer invisible from our side.

Love in every season: a daily way of life, a deep and abiding peace, light in the darkness, strength before fear, gentle embrace in loss.

...picture yourself in such a time,
...what is the feeling in your body?
...what is happening to your heart and soul?

<< as you begin to feel it, really feel the truth that God wants nothing less than love for you, say the mantra out loud, again and again, with quiet strength. >>

Love in every season: we shall come up against all manner of dark voids and eclipse, and also into endlessly beautiful constellations of creativity, and joy, purpose and meaning, faith and love.

In every instance God loves us, Jesus loves us, we are love, and "the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness shall not overcome us."³