November 30, 2023
Dear Leland and Everett,
A few weeks ago in worship service the Gospel reading was Mark 12:28-34. In this passage, Jesus says that the most important of the Jewish laws are to love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength. Our minister proceeded to point out that Christians don’t talk about this commandment much. He even pointed out that he struggled to find hymns that focused on loving God as opposed to receiving God’s love.
I sat gobsmacked processing the truth of the minister’s observations. Especially in secular culture, but even in the church, we focus a lot on the second most important law according to Jesus: love your neighbor as yourself. But I barely recall ever discussing how to love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength. The incredible irony is that I am intimately aware that we are told to love God. Indeed, Christians call this the Great Commandment. We hear this passage over and over again. And yet, amazingly, I don’t ever recall discussion of what this might mean in terms of actions or habits or practices.
In the worship service, the minister asked us to pray and, in the prayer, to practice loving God. I noticed how foreign and surreal this felt. Faced with the apparent gap between the importance of loving God (at least according to Jesus) and my personal experience, I resolved to begin a practice. Since that sermon I’ve started each day’s meditation with at least a brief moment of loving God intentionally.
Partly I tell this story to highlight how wisdom often eludes us, even when sitting directly in front of us. I’ve known my whole life that Jesus instructs us to love God, and yet I’ve never until the last few weeks done anything intentional to follow that instruction. I sincerely doubt I am the only one; my strong suspicion, just based on the conversations I hear amongst Christians, is that most Christians almost certainly do not actively love God in any meaningful way. We talk a lot about receiving God’s love and doing God’s will, but rarely talk about loving God or how to do so. I say this not in judgement; indeed I’m not criticizing myself nor anyone else. Again, I’m just pointing out how an instruction has been sitting in front of Christians for 2,000 years, and yet we seem to have almost completely forgotten it, at least in terms of actually doing what we’re instructed to do.
Mostly though, I write to share a few observations from my newfound practice. In my first few prayers, I imagined sending a beam of loving energy to God. I felt truly disoriented, wondering why God needed me to send God love, especially when I happen to believe that God IS love. If God is love, why would God need me to love him? The answer came to me almost immediately: God doesn’t need me to love him. So then I wondered what the point was. Since I believe God is love, this implies I was sending God’s love to God, a concept I found rather bewildering.
After some time, I started to feel love flowing through me in a manner I hadn’t experienced before, at least not in my adult life. At that point I started to suspect that the act of loving God wasn’t meant to help God (again, God doesn’t need me to love him) so much as it was meant to help me. Just through the practice of loving, I was able to access more love. I felt more love, and I felt love’s healing energy flowing through me.
As I’ve continued to practice loving God, I’ve come to believe that loving God, loving ourselves, and loving others are all ultimately the same thing. We can’t love God fully without loving ourselves or others. We can love ourselves fully without loving God or others. And we can’t love others fully without loving ourselves and God. Attempting to love one or two but not all three inevitably devolves. For example (and speaking on behalf of my own affliction), codependents attempt to love others, in my case without attempting to love myself or God. Eventually that love starts to come from a place of fear, and the love itself becomes less love and more an attempt to control as an output of fear.
In theory, one could practice loving fully by focusing exclusively on loving God, ourselves, or others. Because again, when we love fully, there really is no difference between loving God, ourselves, and others. We become an expression of love, receiving and sending love, and being filled with love in the process. In truth, my sense is that we need to practice loving God, ourselves, and others intentionally. Only through the intentional practice, pursued from multiple angles, do we find that those angles converge. And only then do we understand the depth of love available to us. We learn that sending and receiving love are one and the same action, for only in the act of sending love to we truly receive it, and only via the process of receiving love do we access enough to send. I find that some days I am drawn to practice sending love, other days to practice receiving. Each day I discover that these actions are ultimately connected, and sense that I am merely strengthening my understanding of how they are connected. Ultimately I am realizing that love wants to flow; love is not meant to be held. Given space to flow, love grows. Like water, love looks for openings through which to flow. Our purpose, then, is to create, nurture, and widen that opening in ourselves, that we might become conduits of love in the world.
But don’t take my word for it. Practice, perhaps via meditation, loving God, loving yourselves, and loving others. Explore what the practice means to you. If the practice does not resonate, perhaps pause the practice and come back to it later. Our spiritual journeys are meant to be unique (though they echo in similarity with others’). My sense is that this practice will resonate for you when the time is right.
I love you,
Dad
Letters to Leland 