To say that there is a God, to say that God is, is to say that “love is the source, center, and destiny of experience.”[i]
To be made in the image of God means that we are gifted-into-being, that our very being, our being at all, our being here now but not for long, our being not for long yet forever, is the result of a labor of love by Love for the sake of love. To be made in the image of God is to trace our existence to the generosity and extravagance of Divine love.
To be made in the image of Love is to be loved, to be the beloved of Love, the beloved of God. This, and only this, is our raison d’être. To be made in the image of Love is to be made for love– to be loved and to love. To be or not to be is not the question. At least not the preeminent question. The burning question. The question that waits for us to live into it. The question that is not ever supposed to go away. The preeminent question is to love or not to love. It can only be answered in real actions by real people in real time in a festival of conscious repetition.
To be made in the image of Love means that we belong to Love. We are not owned by Love. We belong to Love. When we realize that we belong to Love we awaken to the reality that Love’s rightful claim on us has been revoked, as only Love can and would do, so that we are free to give our life to Love or not. When we realize we belong to Love, we awaken to the mystery and the revelation that we belong to each other and to all creatures and to all things.
Life is benediction and evocation because even a gift– or more accurately, especially a gift– given freely invites a response. Not a pay back, a response. Not an enforced obligation, an inherent summons. Not a coerced duty, a volitional deed of the heart. To be human means to be responsive and to respond means to promise in return. The implicit return is not a burden but a blessing, the highest honor, the most generous compliment given to humans – the privilege to participate in Love, the privilege to incarnate Divine love “on earth as it is in heaven.”
There are so many questions that distract and deplete us. Even more, faux experts peddling pseudo-questions with ready-made answers divert us from the heart of the matter and keep us away from enacting it. But for humans gifted with the twin capacities of consciousness and conscience, there really is only one question and only two possible answers (“sort of” is not an answer. It’s a dodge, a stall tactic à la Augustine’s famous prayer, “Lord give me chastity and continence, just not yet.”). To become human is to wake up to the one root question – “Will I give my life for the sake of Love?” and to the many branches that reach forth from its trunk?
Do I consciously acknowledge that I belong to Love?
Will I commit myself to live from my own God-given, inviolable belovedness?
Will I dare to recognize and root out all the reasons and excuses not to love?
Will I allow myself to be transfigured by Love?
Will I bring love where there is no love so that others might find love?[ii]
Will I consciously and intentionally help others to recognize, receive, and live out their belovedness for their own good and the good of all the earth?
Will I resist the trivialization, sentimentalizing, and evasion of love by making love real in simple acts of reverence and kindness, small gestures of welcome and inclusion, quiet words of encouragement and solidarity, hidden deeds of attentive presence and compassion?
Will I risk seeing each day as a series of opportunities to choose love, as invitations strung together by grace to cooperate with God in making the world one?
To belong to Love means that what goes around comes around. To say that there is a God, to say that God is, is to say that “love is the source, center, and destiny of experience.”
A Lover-in-Training,
Dan
Endnotes
[i] John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom.
[ii] St. John of the Cross wrote “Where there is no love, put love, and you will find love.”