Falling in love with God – 3 June 2016

After the weighty stuff of the last four weeks, I wondered, whatever will we think about now?  The advancing years bring a risk of becoming tedious and making Jesus’s gospel, which is always fresh, seem predictable, boring or out of reach.  Then arrived, from the NZ Community for Christian Meditation, a flyer for a meditation retreat this very weekend.  It seems this retreat had not attracted all the enrolments they hoped for, and so they sent a last-minute notification.  It is to be led by a Canadian, Sister Christina, and the theme is:  Falling in love with God.

Now, my wife reminds me that I am eccentric... however, for some reason that theme rattles me.  Falling in love with God… something about it is not right, and my initial instinct is… embarrassment. 

I don’t fall in love with God.  With Moses in the desert, at the sight of the burning bush, I come to a stop.  I remove my shoes.  I am still, I am quiet, I wait, and listen.  It is never that I am bestowing upon God the benefit of my love.  All love comes from God.  If I am loving – if I can fulfil the Great Commandment, to love God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength -- it is that God has made me so. Read the First Letter of John, which may be among the last and most mature writings to make it into the Christian Bible.  The writer is lyrical:

Beloved, let us love one another.  Love is from God.  Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God…  God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them… [I John 4:7ff]

Love, it says, is what I receive.  God is the fount and giver of love. 

But also that phrase, “falling in love”, is a problem.  In modern ears, it has become a sentimental, vapid concept.  People fall in and out of love all the time – it is what the culture expects.  It seems inevitable. 

Love in the rich terms of Christian faith is not that.  It is responding Yes, from our depths, to what we find in Jesus, in creation and in Christ.  It is saying Yes, de profundis, from the depths, to life with its light and also its darkness.  It is weeping with those who weep, as St Paul put it, and rejoicing with those who rejoice.  God was never not in love with me. 

I am sure, I hasten to say, that Sister Christina is well aware of all this.  Her brochure does actually reassure me somewhat.  But I took my initial hesitation at her theme title, Falling in love with God, as an opportunity to work out why it was I heard a distant alarm. 

John writes: Herein is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us… [I John 4:10]  That is the mystery and wonder of it all.  Thank you, Sister Christina.