Loving and Being Loved
The root of Christian Love is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved, the faith that one is loved by God, although unworthy. Thomas Merton
Gregg’s Reflection
I am an Enneagram 8. The childhood wound of the 8 is that they grew up in an unsafe environment. they didn’t feel safe to show any vulnerability, and may have felt controlled. Weakness was used against them, so they focused only on building their strength (from the EnneaApp).
My father lost his mother before he was 10. His father left him to be reared by his stern grandmother. He grew up durning the Depression, and fought in World War II. He did not know how to show love, only to challenge. I grew up knowing I was ‘not good enough’, and the most he could say was, ‘I love you anyway.’ Two years of therapy helped me understand that deep within was a little boy who just wanted his father to love him.
So, you can imagine what my image of God was. A stern father, just waiting to whack me when I fell short. So, every time I fell short of my father’s view of perfection, my feelings of unworthiness grew.
Richard Rohr teaches us:
When God looks at us, God can only see “Christ” in us. Yet it's hard for us to be naked and vulnerable and allow ourselves to be seen so deeply. It is hard to simply receive God's loving and all-accepting gaze. We feel unworthy and ashamed. The very essence of all faith is to trust the gaze and then complete the circuit of mutual friendship.
As an Enneagram 8, being vulnerable was the last thing I wanted, and it was indeed hard to simply receive God’s love. Rohr goes on to tell us:
If we are lucky, we received a combination of both kinds of love from our parents. Experiencing unconditional love as a child gives us a strong sense of self. Yet we need to hear the sacred no-something to bump up against, to discover limits or we will never go deep and discover the best in ourselves.
At best, a father’s love is also conditional because it teaches the son discipline and a conditional demand against our own natural egocentricity.
Indeed, I learned many things from my father, persistence, perseverance, commitment to task, and high standards of excellence. Unfortunately, he also taught me I needed to be all these things to be loved.
It was a long road to accept that God loved me ‘anyway.’ Now I realize that we can only love to the extent that we allow ourselves to be loved. My dear wife Genie has loved me unconditionally for over 50 years, and she helped melt my hard heart to love. What a wonderful gift to give someone. So, wade in and see just how much you are loved by God. A final gift from Rohr, “God does not love us because we are good, God loves us because He is good.”
Blessings, Gregg
Loving and Being Loved
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Journaling Prompts
What is your image of God, compassionate and loving, or stern and judgmental? How does that impact your self-image? How do you experience God’s loving presence? What spiritual practices let you let go of fear and be vulnerable, to let others see your weaknesses and love you just as you are?
We ponder your steadfast love, O God.
Psalm 48:9
Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all offenses.
Proverbs 10:12
The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
Psalm 103:8
I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have drawn you with unfailing kindness.
Jeremiah 31:3
The eyes of the Lord are on those who love Him.
Sirach 34:19
Hear O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.
Mark 12: 29-30
For God to loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
John 3:16
This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
John 15:12
Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friend.
John 15:13
But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Romans 5:8
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. Faith, hope and love abide these three; and the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:4-8, 13
You, all of you, are sons and daughters of God in Christ Jesus.
Galatians 3:26
Follow God’s example, therefore as dearly loved children and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
Ephesians 5:1-2
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and loves God.whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. God is love, and those who abide in love, abide in God and God abides in them.
1 John 4:7-8, 13,16.
Life does not consist of emotions that vacillate, but rather actions and relationships that flow from the eternal life that originated in God alone.
RENOVARE Bible notes on 2 John, p. 466 NT
Ancient Writings
Love is the highest form of knowing.
St. Augustine
Love is the fountain of life, and the soul which does not drink from it cannot be called alive. Here are his four degrees of love:
The 1st Degree: Loving Yourself For Your Own Sake (Selfish Love)
The 2nd Degree: Loving God for Your Own Blessing (Dependence on God)
The 3rd Degree: Loving God for God’s Own Sake (Intimacy with God)
The 4th Degree: Self-Love for God’s Sake (Being United with God’s Love). From his book, The Love of God
Bernard of Clairvaux
When God loves, he wants only to be loved; he loves for no other reason than to be loved, knowing that those who have loved him are made blessed by that love.
Bernard of Clairvaux, Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, McGinn, p. 259
“My Mystery will always be protected from fools," He said. "For fools think they know, fools think they understand. Fools are never foolish enough to lose their heads for love. And who but the headless ever approach My Throne?”
Rumi
Remember, the smallest of souls is still the daughter of the Father, the sister of the Son, the friend of the Holy Spirit and the true bride of the Trinity.
Mechthild of Magdeburg, Woodruff, Meditations with Mechthild, p.46
God is an artist and the universe is God’s work of art. All natural things are produced by divine art and can rightly be called God's works of Art. How then could God hate a single thing when God is the artist of everything.
Thomas Acquinas, Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics, p. 104
O my beloved son, look, I am that same Eternal Wisdom, the Son of the Heavenly Father, the bearer of mercy, the chief of forgiveness and legislator of loving-kindness, who has opened up the abyss of mercy that is incomprehensible to every created spirit by reason of its infinity. I will receive you, as well as all who want to return to me, into my most loving bosom.
Henry Suso, Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism p. 235
Some of us believe God is all-power and can do all, and that God is all-wisdom and knows how to do all. But God is all-love and wants to love all, and here we restrain ourselves. And this ignorance hinders most of God’s lovers, as I see it...God wants to be thought of as our lover.
Julian of Norwich, Brendan Doyle, Meditations with Julian of Norwich p. 119, 113
It is the condition of a true lover that the more he loves, the more he longs to love.
Cloud of Unknowing, trans. It’s Progiff, p. 100
Simply to love is its own reward.
St. John of the Cross, Naked Now, p. 141
When you send love out from the bountifulness of your own love, it reaches other people. This love is the deepest power of prayer. Prayer is the act and presence of sending this light from the bountifulness of your love to other people to heal, free, and bless them.
John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, p. 35-36
Mothering God
From the moment I was born in Your mind,
I've been
Loved.
Adored.
Precious.
A little miracle of Life.
As Your child, You cherish me.
And You would protect me with a fierce love, like a Lioness with her cub.
Inside of me, every day,
there's a part that needs to know I'm treasured like this, and protected by Your fierce, tender Mother-Love.
And though I will always be Your child, I am no longer young.
I walk strong on this earth.
And there are those who need my care and attention, precious ones I seek to protect.
So as I engage with this world that needs my own acts of love in ways that will exhaust me, wound me, and cause me to doubt myself -keep in me the secret knowledge of my belovedness.
May it be tucked in
deep, safe in my heart.
it is enough.
Celtic Daily Prayer, Book Two
What you love most may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain for the climber is clearer from the plain.
Khalil Gibran, Friendship
Modern Writings
The physical structure of the universe is love. The day will come when, after harnessing space, winds, the tide and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, humanity will have discovered fire.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit priest, mystic, and paleontologist
If we accept the basic proposition that life is one, arising out of a common center God, all expressions of love are an act of God.
Howard Thurman, Deep is the Hunger, p.1089
What had I learned about love? One of the central things was that the experience of being understood by another was of primary importance. Somewhere deep within was a “place” beyond all faults and virtues that had to be confirmed before I could run the risk of opening my life up to another. To find ultimate security in an ultimate vulnerability, this is to be loved.
Howard Thurman, With Head and Heart p. 148
Not to accept and love and do God’s will is to refuse the fullness of my existence.
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 33.
The root of Christian Love is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved, the faith that one is loved by God, although unworthy.
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 75
Divine love is compassionate, tender, luminous, totally self-giving, seeking no reward, unifying everything.
Thomas Keating, Open Hearts Open Minds, p. 160
We are not loved because we are so beautiful and good. We are beautiful and good because we are loved.
Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Joy, CAC video interview, 2014
The mystical certainty that nothing can separate us from the love of God grows when we ourselves become one with love by placing ourselves, freely and without guarantee of success, on the side of love.
Dorothee Sölle, Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics, p. 278
Love is to be found only in fearlessness and freedom.
Anthony De Mello, The Way to Love, p. 88.
Love your neighbor as yourself. We cannot possibly love God with our whole being if we do not love what he loves and how he loves. Christ loves us as his very own body. And we are indeed one in his body. The true self is a self we all all are in Christ and his love.
Basil Pennington, Lectio Divina, p. 87
If prayer leads us into deeper unity with the compassionate Christ, it will always give rise to concrete acts of service. And if concrete acts of service do indeed lead us to a deeper solidarity with the poor, the hungry, the sick, the dying, and the oppressed, they will always give rise to prayer. In prayer we meet Christ, and in him all human suffering. In service we meet people, and in them the suffering Christ. . . .Action with and for those who suffer is the concrete expression of a compassionate life and the final criterion of being a Christian.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 5/26/20
Once we deeply trust that we ourselves are precious in God’s eyes, we are able to recognize the preciousness of others and their unique place in God’s heart.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 8/13/20
We have such a need for love that we often expect from our fellow human beings something that only God can give, and then we quickly end up being angry, resentful, lustful, and sometimes even violent.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 10/20/20
When we love God with all our heart, mind, strength, and soul, we cannot do other than love our neighbor, and our very selves. It is in being fully rooted in the heart of God that we are creatively connected with our neighbor as well as with our deepest self.
In the heart of God we can see that the other human beings who live on this earth with us are also God’s sons and daughters, and belong to the same family we do. There, too, I can recognize and claim my own belovedness, and celebrate with my neighbors.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 11/17/20
For most of my life I have struggled to find God, to know God, to love God. Now I realize that during all this time God has been trying to find me, to know me, and to love me. The question is not “How am I to find God?” but “How am I to let myself be found by him?”
The question is not “How am I to know God?” but “How am I to let myself be known by God?” And, finally, the question is not “How am I to love God?” but “How am I to let myself be loved by God?” God is looking into the distance for me, trying to find me, and longing to bring me home.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 1/14/21
Do not hesitate to love and to love deeply. When those you love deeply reject you, leave you, or die, your heart will be broken. But that should not hold you back from loving deeply. The pain that comes from deep love makes your love even more fruitful. It is like a plow that breaks the ground to allow the seed to take root and grow into a strong plant.
Every time you experience the pain of rejection, absence, or death, you are faced with a choice. You can become bitter and decide not to love again, or you can stand straight in your pain and let the soil on which you stand become richer and more able to give life to new seeds.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 2/3/21
When I abide in Jesus I abide with him in God. “Those who love me, will be loved by my Father,” John 14:21 tells us. My true spiritual work is to let myself be loved, fully and completely, and to trust that in that love I will come to the fulfillment of my vocation. I keep trying to bring my wandering, restless, anxious self home, so that I can rest there in the embrace of love.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 3/8/21
Knowing God’s heart means consistently, radically, and very concretely to announce and reveal that God is love and only love, and that every time fear, isolation, or despair begin to invade the human soul this is not something that comes from God. This sounds very simple and maybe even trite, but very few people know that they are loved without any conditions or limits.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 10/5/21
Claim Your Truth
It seems crucial that you realize deeply that your worth and value does not depend on anyone else. You have to claim your own inner truth. You are a person worth being loved and called to give love, not because anyone says so . . . but because you are created out of love and live in the embrace of a God who didn’t hesitate to send his only son to die for us. . . . Your being good and worthy of love does not depend on any human being. You have to keep saying to yourself: “I am being loved by an unconditional, unlimited love and that love allows me to be a free person, center of my own actions and decisions.”
The more you can come to realize this, the more you will be able to forgive those who have hurt you and love them in their brokenness. Without a deep feeling of self-respect, you cannot forgive and will always feel anger, resentment, and revenge. The greatest human act is forgiveness: “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who have sinned against us.”
Forgiveness stands in the center of God’s love for us and also in the center of our love for each other. Loving one another means forgiving one another over and over again.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 2/12/22
Laying our hearts totally open to God leads to a love of ourselves that enables us to give wholehearted love to our fellow human beings. In the seclusion of our hearts we learn to know the hidden presence of God; and with that spiritual knowledge we can lead a loving life.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 2/14/22
Let my love touch the deepest, most hidden corners of your heart and reveal to you your own beauty, a beauty that you have lost sight of, but that will become visible to you again in the light of my mercy. Come, come, let me wipe your tears, and let my mouth come close to your ear and say to you, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 3/21/23
Love can happen only in the realms of freedom. Without inner freedom on both sides there could be no true love relationship only duty, fear, or obligation. So it is all a matter of growing in freedom, which could be called growing in grace. God‘s love is perfectly free. It is not coerced by any of our good actions, nor can we lose it because of our bad actions. This frees us to simply receive that love, rather than feverishly try to make ourselves worthy of it.
Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation, p. 236
For Jesus, prayer seems to be a matter of waiting in love. Returning to love. Trusting that love is the deepest stream of reality. That’s why prayer isn’t primarily words; it’s primarily an attitude, a stance. That’s why Paul could say, “Pray always; pray unceasingly” (1 Thessalonians 5:17).
If we read that as requiring words, it’s surely impossible. We’ve got lots of other things to do. We can pray unceasingly, however, if we find the stream and know how to wade in its waters. The stream will flow through us; all we have to do is keep choosing to stay there.
Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer, p. 81.
Many of us find it hard to receive underserved love from another. For some reason, it is very humiliating to the ego. We want to think we have earned any love that we get by our worthiness or attractiveness.
Richard Rohr, Yes, and, p. 74
God does not love us because we are good. God loves us because God is good. We naturally live in the meritocracy of quid pro quo. We must be taught by God and grace how to live in an economy of grace. Divine love is received by surrender instead of any kind of performance principle.
Richard Rohr, Yes, and, p. 78
Most of us were taught that God would love us if and when we change. In fact, God loves you so that you can change. What empowers change, what makes you desirous of change, is the inner experience of love. This alone becomes the engine of positive change.
Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love, p. 1
If you have never experienced human love, it will be very hard for you to access God as love. If you have never let God love you, you will not know how to love humanly in the deepest way.
Richard Rohr, Naked Now, p. 140
Mature Christianity is an invitation to share in the personal life of God, a dynamic of generated love forever continued in space and time through God’s creatures. Thus, God’s self-knowledge includes knowledge of us, and God’s self-love includes love of us. They are the same knowing, the same loving, and the same freedom.
Richard Rohr
Remember, as soon as any giving wants or needs a reward in return, you have backed away from love, which is why our common notion of ‘heaven’ can keep us from the pure love of God or neighbor. A pure act of love is its own reward, and needs nothing in return. Love is shown precisely in an eagerness to love. Please dwell on these things.
Richard Rohr, Eager to Love, p. 243
Love is a very real energy, a spiritual force that is much more powerful than ideas or mere thoughts. Love is endlessly alive, always flowing towards the lower place, and thus life-giving for all, like a great river and water itself.
Richard Rohr, Eager to Love, p. 267
When God looks at us, God can only see “Christ” in us. Yet it's hard for us to be naked and vulnerable and allow ourselves to be seen so deeply. It is hard to simply receive God's loving and all-accepting gaze. We feel unworthy and ashamed. The very essence of all faith is to trust the gaze and then complete the circuit of mutual friendship.
Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love, p. 94
Lover of All
Lord, lover of life, lover of these lives,
Lord, lover of our souls, lover of our bodies, lover of all that exists . . .
In fact, it is your love that keeps it all alive . . .
May we live in this love.
May we never doubt this love.
May we know that we are love,
That we were created for love,
That we are a reflection of you,
That you love yourself in us and therefore we are perfectly lovable.
May we never doubt this deep and abiding and perfect goodness
That we are because you are.
Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love p. 21-22.
The divine flow either flows both in and out, or it is not flowing at all. The “trap doors” at either end must be kept open in order to both receive and let go, which is the work of all true spirituality.
Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love, p. 39
You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor, and hate your enemy.’ But I say unto you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven. (Matthew 5:43-45) Jesus understood the difficulty inherent in the act of loving one’s enemy. He never joined the ranks of those who talk glibly about the easiness of the moral life.
He realized that every genuine expression of love grows out of a consistent and total surrender to God. So when Jesus said “Love your enemy,” he was not unmindful of its stringent qualities. Yet he meant every word of it. Our responsibility as Christians is to discover the meaning of this command and seek passionately to live it out in our daily lives. . . .
Richard Rohr, CAC Daily Devotion, 11/9/20
Martin Luther King, Jr defined agape love as willingness to serve without the desire for reciprocation, willingness to suffer without the desire for retaliation, and willingness to reconcile without the desire for domination. This is clearly a Divine love that the small self cannot achieve by itself.
Richard Rohr, “Martin Luther King Jr.’s Principles of Nonviolence,” Oneing 10, no. 2, Nonviolence (Fall 2022): 47, 48.
The Gospels portray Jesus showing both unconditional and conditional love. We need both loves to grow up properly: conditional love when we’re strong and brash, unconditional love when we are weak and self-doubting.
If we are lucky, we received a combination of both kinds of love from our parents. Experiencing unconditional love as a child gives us a strong sense of self. Yet we need to hear the sacred no-something to bump up against, to discover limits or we will never go deep and discover the best in ourselves.
At best, a father’s love is also conditional because it teaches the son discipline and a conditional demand against our own natural egocentricity.
Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation, p. 40-41
We long for God because God longs for us.
Ilia Delio
Knowledge may lead us to the doorstep of God, but it is love that enters the mystery of God.
Ilia Delio, Christ in Evolution, p. 132
To love God is to live Christ.
Ilia Delio, Christ in Evolution, p. 151
Love is absolutely vital for a human life, for love alone can awaken what is divine within you. In love, you grow and come home to yourself. When you learn to love and let yourself be loved, you come home to the hearth of your own spirit. You are completely at one in the house of your own longing and belonging.
John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, p. 7
Beneath the shattered surface of the world, it became possible to see how tenderly all things are being held in love.
Cynthia Bourgeault Wisdom Way of Knowing, p. 10
To practice meditation as an act of religious faith is to open ourselves to the endlessly reassuring realization that our very being and the very being of everyone and everything around us is the generosity of God. For God is creating us in the present moment, loving us into being, such that our very presence in the present moment is the manifested presence of God. We meditate that we might awaken to this unitive mystery, not just in meditation, but in every moment of our lives.
James Finley, Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God p. 9.
People who are learning to love their neighbors, themselves, and the earth will not find it hard to learn to love God. Rather, in their experience of love for neighbor, self, and creation, they will have already experienced God.
Brian McLaren, Great Spiritual Migration, p. 60
Paul says that the whole law was summarized in love for neighbor (Gal 5:14) and that love for neighbor fulfills the whole law (Rom 13:10). Only through loving neighbors do we prepare our hearts to love God. We might even say that the way to God runs through our neighbors, especially those who are vulnerable.
Brian McLaren, Great Spiritual Migration, p. 57
If you want to see the future of Christianity, go look in the mirror and look at your neighbor. God’s message of love is sent into the world in human envelopes.
Brian McLaren, CAC Morning Devotion, 8/19/20
“Sister, what are those slats of light breaking through the clouds?” She looks up and says, “That is God pouring Himself into someone. God does that all the time. God is very loving light.”
Martin Laird. Ocean of Light, p. 143
The fourteenth-century author of The Cloud of Unknowing acknowledges the distinction (not separation) between what our love can do and our thinking mind cannot. The author likens it to having two faculties, a faculty (or capacity) of the thinking, calculating mind and a faculty for loving. God created each of these. However, “God is forever beyond the reach of the first of these, the intellectual faculty; but by means of the second, the loving faculty, [God] can be fully grasped by each individual being.”
Martin Laird
To truly love God is to love what God loves and it is us which God loves most. Therefore, in the pursuit of the love of God we must begin with ourselves. When we truly love ourselves then we see ourselves as God does.
Because we are the image of God we can only love God as much as we first love ourselves. If we do not love ourselves we are seeing a false image that is not of God. If we saw, with eyes truly opened, who we really are, then we would have no choice but to love ourselves. If we do not love ourselves then we do not have the truth.
Justin Coutts, To Love Yourself is the Beginning of Wisdom, In Search of a New Eden, 6/20/21
Real love is frightening, it entails the dissolution of boundaries and the death of the ego. Yet as we learn to surrender to the action of Holy Love, we reconnect with the ocean of Being and realize that at our core, we are this Love. We are this endless, dynamic, transforming Presence of loving awareness, and it has always been so.
Don Riso and Russ Hudson, The Wisdom of the Enneagram, p. 338, 340.
When I felt shame, I sensed an invitation from God which indeed had been there all along: turn your gaze toward Me. This kind of turning, you see, is a difficult movement. Not because condemnation awaits but because mercy does. Not because you won’t be met with eyes of love but because you will.
Letting yourself be loved when you feel unlovable is a crucial inward movement. It is, paradoxically, when you forget about yourself. Because in that moment you agree with the truth that the love of God is greater than your shortcomings. Thomas Aquinas describes contemplation as a simple, unimpeded, penetrating gaze at the truth. And the longer you gaze at the truth, the freer you become.
Brian Morykon, RENOVARE Weekly Digest 1/13-17/20.
Like so many things in the spiritual life, love can’t simply be willed. At least not very well nor for very long. It has to be grown. And prayer is the garden where love is cultivated. In prayer we discover we are loved first. In prayer our compassion grows not by grit but by grace. In prayer our love is sustained, for God is the fountain of living water.
Brian Morykon, RENOVARE Weekly Digest, 9/14-18/20
The whole of Jesus’ ministry was to establish a community so convinced of their Belovedness to God that they proclaim the Belovedness of others. Belovedness is a massive act of owning and accepting your humanness as a gift from a God who deeply loves you.
Osheta Moore, Dear White Peacemakers: Dismantling Racism with Grit and Grace, p. 97