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The Universal Love of God

“The message of hope the contemplative offers you... is... that whether you understand or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you, and offers you an understanding and light which are like nothing you ever found in books of head in sermons. The contemplative has nothing to tell you except to reassure you and say that if you dare to penetrate your own silence and risk the sharing of that solitude with the lonely other who seeks God through you, then you will truly recover the light and the capacity to understand what is beyond words and beyond explanations because it is too close to be explained: it is the intimate union in the depths of your own heart, of God's spirit and your own secret inmost self, so that you and He are in all truth One Spirit.”
Thomas Merton
Each day I find myself more and more rooted in the Good News of Universalism. I have less and less time for clever language and vague affirmations. As I get older, my faith becomes simpler, more child-like. My faith is that God loves me and God loves you and God loves everyone. That's it.

In a sense, that's not a very original message, all Christians would affirm it. The difference though, for me, in my understanding of a contemporary Universalism, is just how far and deep that love goes.

God loves you: therefore hell cannot exist.

God loves you: and God loves you whatever your beliefs, whatever religion you belong to. You don't have to sign up to a particular religious expression to access that love. The simple act of looking within "penetrating your own silence" opens you to that love. When a Muslim prays they have just as much access to that love as when a Christian prays. Even when a Buddhist or an atheists prays... even when the categories of "prayer" "love" and "God" fall away... you still have access to that same experience of being a Beloved held in the arms of the Eternal.

God loves you: and God loves love. God delights in the intimacy of two men or two women (or whatever gender anyone has) just as much as God delights in the intimacy of a man and a woman.

God loves everyone: and entering into that stream of love involves doing the same. The challenge of this is huge. Yes, it involves nuance and work and thinking about what it means to forgive, to love enemies, to truly work for the well-being of others as well as ourselves, but that's the necessary challenge.

God loves everyone: and weeps hardest and longest when people are put down, diminished in their souls and beaten in their bodies. God weeps and shares in the sorrow and anger of people who have been made victims of white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, war, and ecological genocide. 

God loves you. This is the message of hope offered by the spiritual practice of contemplation. This is the invitation to discover.

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