Steadfast Love

Love alone of all things is sufficient unto itself. It is its own end, its own merit, its own satisfaction. It seeks no cause beyond itself and needs no fruit outside of itself. Its fruit is its use. I love simply because I am love. That is my deepest identity, what I am created in and for.

For me, to love others "in God" is to love them for their own sake and not for what they do for me or because I am psychologically healed and capable. Our transformed consciousness sees another person as another self, as one who also is loved by Christ with me and not an object separate from myself, on which I generously bestow my Christian favors.

If I have not yet loved or if love wears me out, is it partly because other people are seen as tasks or threats instead of extensions of my own suffering and loneliness? Yet, are they not in truth extensions of the suffering and loneliness of God?

When I live out of this truth, of the love-that-I-am, I will at last begin to live.

Richard Rohr, from "Image and Likeness: The Restoration of the Divine Image"

The suffering and loneliness of God? How can that be? Does such a phrase not go against all we have heard and been taught about the "impassibility of God?"

But the people God created can sin. They can walk away from God, and they can suffer the consequences. As a consequence of the fall, the beings God created, human and otherwise, suffer accidents, illness and decrepitude (Romans 8.18-23). If God loves them, if God is love, will he not grieve for them, will he not miss them? What monstrous kind of love could we conceive that would not feel "suffering and loneliness?"

Of course the doctrine of impassibility, like so many of the ancient doctrines of our faith, is easily misunderstood. My unlettered reading of this is that while it may be impossible for God to be anyone's, or anything's, victim (being all-powerful) his settled choice to love no matter what the consequences - "steadfast love" (Psalm 13.5 etc.) - will by definition involve him in suffering.

This, as I see it, is what Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane (Matthew 26.36ff) is all about. Jesus had come to suffer and die for our salvation - yet he had to make a choice to follow the Father's will. Had he not so chosen, no-one could have forced him to submit to the Cross (Matthew 26.53).

Writing of the Asian Tsunami of Boxing Day 2004 in the Sunday Telegraph, Rowan Williams said:

... the reaction of faith is or should be always one of passionate engagement with the lives that are left, a response that asks not for understanding but for ways of changing the situation in whatever – perhaps very small – ways that are open to us. The odd thing is that those who are most deeply involved – both as sufferers and as helpers – are so often the ones who spend least energy in raging over the lack of explanation. They are likely to shrug off, awkwardly and not very articulately, the great philosophical or religious questions we might want to press. Somehow, they are most aware of two things: a kind of strength and vision just to go on; and a sense of the imperative for practical service and love. Somehow in all of this, God simply emerges for them as a faithful presence. Arguments "for and against" [God's "permitting" such suffering] have to be put in the context of that awkward, stubborn persistence.

God's love is all and in all. All we are called to do is live that love in the lives God has given us to live, in whatever circumstances that we find ourselves in. The ones who can do this, really do it, are the ones we remember - from Paul of Tarsus through Francis of Assisi and Julian of Norwich, through to Mother Teresa of Calcutta - as "the Saints." After all, "saint" only means "made sacred or holy" (Latin sanctus). How else are we to be made holy but to be made into love?