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Knowing the reality of God's love



I want to write about how it's possible to know the reality of God's love. I find this challenging as for a long as I can remember I have had a relationship with God. Growing up going to church I discovered God amidst the music, the hymns, the ritual. I talked to God and I always felt God was there.

This is not to say that it's always been plain sailing and there's not been times of doubt and dullness. That have been, but my relationship with God has remained. But I want to try to write something that might be useful to someone who hasn't had that experience and who might find the idea of God rather puzzling or mystifying or just plain weird.

Ralph Waldo Emerson advised his contemporaries to “dare to love God without mediator or veil”. I think this points us in the right direction, even though it's advice that many religious people have not taken. But God (according to the radical mystical tradition that Emerson represents) should not be something experienced second-hand, something known by just reading about God in a book, or hearing about some other “holy” person who has experienced God. No, we should experience God for ourselves. We should not “believe” a set of ideas, a set of beliefs, a philosophical theory, but experience the Divine and experience a way of life rooted in the Divine.

Don't believe in God. Belief is a second-hand activity. The first-hand activity is knowing God. How do you know God? By loving God. The only way to know God is to enter into a love relationship with God.

How is that possible? It sounds like it might just be circular reasoning or simply nonsense. But that's only when we're trying to approach things through the "higher" intellectual, rational parts of ourselves. And that's only one way to approach reality. Every person also has the ability to approach reality through the emotional, bodily, poetic, "spiritual" self.

Certain experiences in life open us to a different way of approaching reality. Think of listening to an overwhelming piece of classical music that somehow makes you feel both joyful and sad at the same time. Think the ecstasy of sexual union. Think of being in "flow" when you are so absorbed in a task you stop thinking. Think of falling in love. Think of the pain of grief.

The last two might be the most significant. Richard Rohr says the two primary paths to transformation are great love and great suffering. It's these things that shatter the ego and allow us to approach God. But in all of these experiences we begin to approach "the spiritual" - we begin to grow our capacity to "hear" God (or to "see" God, whatever metaphor you want to use).

When we know that what we're "listening" for is something like a feeling of love, something like awe and wonder, something like a feeling of joy, we can enter into the practice of prayer with these sorts of senses "sharpened".

Prayer comes in many forms: meditation, singing, chanting, visualisation, but I am an advocate of the kind of prayer some people will think is childish. Just talk to God. Just talk as if someone were listening, and as if they care and want to listen to you. And say whatever you want to. It might feel silly. It might feel silly for a very long time. But stick with it. Even if you're pretty sure there is no one listening, I'm convinced that this practice is really good for your mental health. It's the practice of expressing your deepest thoughts, worries, fears, joys, gratitudes. It's an emotionally healthy thing to do.

But I think if you go into this with your spiritual senses sharpened, you can begin to have a sense of the Someone that listens. You have to realise it's not magic, you don't hear anything in a normal sense or see anything in a normal sense. But if you realise that "hearing" and "seeing" are metaphors for expressing something that is closer to falling in love, feeling awe, feeling inspiration, then yes, you do "hear" God, you do feel the love of God, and you so you begin to get to know what God is.

God is love. The experience of millions of people is that when you begin to open your heart in this way you begin to experience a deep sense that you are loved. Sometimes it might be overwhelming, something that will make you weep with joy. But most of the time it's just a quiet companionable presence. But it is in remaining in this companionable presence you begin to enter into a love relationship, you begin to begin to love God, and in loving God, you find out what it it to know God. All the belief stuff, the theory, the theology, comes later, if you want it to. But often that stuff can be a distraction from the original raw experience of "loving God without mediator or veil”. The radical mystical traditions tell us to keep that in the centre.

I like the way the Quakers put it: Take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts. Trust them as the leadings of God whose Light shows us our darkness and brings us to new life.

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