Jesus commanded us to love, so we know it is not just a feeling, since you cannot command feelings. Love is a decision.
Jesus did not say:
When you get healed, love;
When you grow up, love; when you feel loving, love;
When you get it together and have dealt with all your mother/father/husband/children wounds,
then you are able to love.
No, the commandment for all of us is to LOVE now.
I think we know the love of God is within us when we ourselves can “do love” much more than when people tell us we are loveable (that just feels good!). We can always disbelieve the second, but the first is an unexplainable power from Beyond ourselves. We know we are being used, and the “Living Water is flowing” through us (John 7:38).
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction (CD)
The great thing about God’s love is that it’s not determined by the object. God does not love us because we are good. God loves us because God is good. It takes our whole lives for that to sink in because that’s not how human love operates.
Human love is largely determined by the attractiveness of the object. When someone is loveable, nice, good, and attractive physically, or has a nice personality, we find it much easier to give ourselves to them. That’s the way humans operate, outside of the economy of grace. Divine love is a love that operates in an unqualified way, without making distinctions between persons and without following our personal preferences. We don’t have the capacity to receive that notion! Divine love is received by surrender instead of performance or perfection.
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Following the Mystics through the Narrow Gate: Seeing God in All Things (CD)
If you keep listening to the love, if you keep receiving the love, trusting the love—even with all your limitations, with all your unworthiness, with all your limited intellect or whatever you feel holds you back—you start to experience within yourself a sense of possibility. Whatever life is inviting you into, you have this sense that it is okay and, even better, and that you can do it! That is the joy of the saints. Now you don’t have to do it by the world’s criteria of success or performance. As Mother Teresa loved to say, “The only real success is faithfulness.” To be faithful to this inner love is in itself the greatest success. It is of itself the major possibility. No outer successes are necessary to be happy.
This is what makes the mystics sort of dangerous. It’s not just possibility they experience—but permission. It’s permission to color outside the lines. It’s permission to be who you really are. It is permission to be the “image and likeness of God” that you already are. We each are unlike any other image or likeness. God is saying to each of us, “All I want is for you to return to the Sender who you really are!” Ironically, it takes most of our life to find it and to accept it.
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Following the Mystics through the Narrow Gate: Seeing God in All Things (CD)
