The love of God is great, and each person is created to experience this love. The definition of love that is most appropriate for understanding this is ‘giving and receiving in thankfulness the eternal good in each situation.’ While this definition may be confusing, it can be simplified to ‘acting at all times how God would act.’
This puts the burden on all of us to get to know God. Without knowing Him, we cannot fully love. While being made in His image and likeness gives us the initial capacity to love and receive love, it takes work, perseverance, and humility to know God. Despite the work and self abasement it takes to grow in knowledge of our Heavenly Father, it becomes a very rewarding endeavor because of the immense consolations we experience through our titillated intellect.
Yet knowing someone is not the same as loving them. Knowledge is certainly a prerequisite for love and will undoubtedly enhance a relationship, but it does not always facilitate the giving and receiving of someone’s greatest good. In fact, the person who knows the most about us could be our enemy. Love occurs when a person takes the knowledge that they have of someone and uses it to give of themselves completely for the other’s good. A parent loves their child by putting their needs and wants before their own. A person loves their spouse by working through relationship issues to find common ground. And a friend loves another friend by being supportive in times of need. In each of these relationships, knowledge of the other is necessary to show true love.
For humans, because we are both body and soul, love can only grow through physical and spiritual proximity. A relationship is enhanced by presence. The more time we spend with someone in unity, the closer we grow to them. This does not mean that uniformity is necessary. Love cannot be existent amongst preprogrammed machines. But it does mean that we must make strides to be unified in the physical and spiritual good of each other. And the best way to do this is to give people our most valuable resources: our time and the space we take up. The more that we spend time with someone in good faith, the more that we will fall in love with them.
This brings us back to God. Created to give Him love and receive His love, we must not only take the time to know him, but to spend time in spiritual and physical proximity with Him. This means time in worship, time in service, and time in evangelization. We spend time in worship when we pray and contemplate who God is. This drives us to go out and seek him in the world. God tells us that He is found in the spiritually and physically poor, thus, there is the need for evangelization which serves the spiritually poor, and for service that serves the needs of the physically poor.
When done humbly in accordance to God’s will, these actions of worship, service, and evangelization are always acts of love because they require us to give our time and space to God and for God. We move from knowledge of God to being in His presence. Because of the nature of love, God gives us His whole self. His unfathomable essence cannot be held within our own minds, but only experienced within our hearts. In His presence, because of the eternal nature of God, knowledge gives way to mystery, and an eternal relationship with God, means an eternity spent in loving mystery with Him.
So as we continue to live life on this earth that will continue in eternity, we must strive to live for the love of God and others. Our time must be spent getting to know God, being in his presence, and entering His mystery. All else is a distraction. God is who we are created for, and it is only in Him that our eternal longing to love and be loved will be satisfied.
