Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and God’s love is perfected in us. . . .God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. ~ I John 4: 11, 16b
For Christians, there are perhaps no more central words in all of scripture than St. John’s three-word proclamation of faith that “God is love” (1 Jn. 4:8b and 16b). The mystery of the Trinity, that is, the mystery not only of God but of life itself, has unfortunately petrified in a doctrine which itself was woodenly reduced to “two guys and a bird.” In reality, the mystery of the Trinity is the underlying truth of John’s three word assertion. The Trinity is the dynamic, interactive, life-giving and life-receiving exchange of love that is the Beloved Community who is God. Trinity means not only that God is not a person but that God is not one entity. God is One and Oneing but not a definable, bounded identity. Rather, God is a community, the Beloved Community, and what animates, unifies, and sustains the community who is God is love. For people of faith, truly living involves being alive to the realization that it is in this community of love that “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
Cistercian monk Thomas Keating says it this way:
Love loving itself eternally in the Trinity is the basis of our own existence, the most intimate part of us, that which is most real in us, the part of us that is capable of infinite happiness through participation in the divine life.
The good news of Jesus is not just that God is love but rather that God extends that love to us and to all creation rather than keep it contained only within God’s own being. Jesus prays: “I ask. . . . as you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us” (Jn. 17:20,21). The nature of God and of God’s love is to invite us to participate in the exchange of love who is the Beloved Community. The invitation that is the good news (an understatement if ever there was one) embodied in Jesus, the incomprehensible surprise of being itself, is in essence the call to “come into God” (from the Latin, in+vitere, to call into) and be part of “Love loving itself.” To come into God is to come home and to be part of the receiving and giving of love. If you get a better offer of what to do with your Friday night, take it.
Last Sunday I reminded you of one of my favorite quotes from Rabbi Heschel: “The purpose of speech is to inform. The purpose of prayer is to partake.” The great divine gift is the opportunity to partake. And the greatest sign of a grateful person, the greatest indication of a prayerful life is the person who is fully, actively, and consciously participating in the divine life who (not which) is the exchange of love. The more aware we become of the gratuity of life, the more grateful we become for it. For it is all gift. But because the gift is not a list of propositions to believe and adhere to but rather the gift-who-is God, and because this gift-who-is-God is dynamic and vivifying and not static or dead, our vocation as human beings is not merely to exist but to live, and to live means to participate fully in the divine life that is offered both as the Source of our being and as the breath or in-spiration for our living.
The way we participate in the divine life, the way we enter into the exchange of love is by allowing ourselves to be saturated by the lavishness of God’s love and then by incarnating it in our daily lives in acts of love, constantly repeated. Receiving love and offering to others the love we receive. Receiving love and offering to others the love we receive. That becomes the embodied mantra and rhythm of our life, the daily practice of intentional (not random) acts of kindness. And so in order to convey the dynamism and action of divine life and love, we might play a bit with John’s three words and say not just that God is love but that God is eternally loving and being loved. As the images of God we are invited and called continually to receive the lavishness of God’s love and to offer that love to others in tangible, incarnated actions.