1. The School of Love

We’re all here to learn how to love. Life is a school of love. The things that happen to you in life are meant to help you learn how to love. The people who cross your path in life are meant to help you learn how to love, and you’re meant to help them learn how to love, too.

We’re all on a journey back to God, a journey ad Deum. It’s just that some of us don’t realize that yet, or have forgotten it, or else don’t want to believe it. But we are. We all came from God, and we’re all intended to return to God. Only in God will we find the ultimate happiness, freedom, purpose, and peace that we so desperately desire.

The little three-word phrase “God is love” (1 John 4:16) is the most profound statement ever uttered by a human being. For some people, however, the phrase “God is love” has become so familiar as to have become almost trite. They may acknowledge that it is true in the abstract, but it is not a truth that they allow to impact their daily lives in any significant way: “‘God is love’ sounds nice, but it doesn’t pay the bills” – this seems to be the attitude of some people. Other people reject the claim that “God is love” entirely.

Many of us need to consider (or reconsider) the profound meaning and implications of the claim that “God is love”. This little phrase not only claims that God exists; it also makes a startling claim about what God is. The claim is not just that God has love, but rather that God is love. Love is what God is. God’s essence, the core of who and what God is, is love. Not thought, or power, or freedom, or knowledge, or any of the other things that we human beings might have expected or predicted to be the essence of God, but love.

But “God is love” is not just a statement about God. It’s also a statement about the nature of existence, the nature of life itself. God is not just one more being among many. God is not some “super-being” with superhuman powers. Some atheists seem to derive pleasure from attacking such images of God, but that’s not the God in whom we Christians believe. No, God is not just one more being among many; God is Being itself (Exodus 3:14; John 8:58). God is the Mind behind all that exists, the Mind that gave rise to all that exists and that sustains everything in existence from moment to moment, the Source and Ground of all that exists, the uncaused Cause of all that exists. So if God is Being itself, and the essence of God is love, then the essence of Being itself is love. Love is what Being is, so love is what being is meant to be. To love is to be, and to love more fully is to be more fully. The more fully we join in the dynamic of love, the more fully we share in Being, and the more fully alive we are.

Some of the ancients described human life as a process of exitus and reditus: a going out from God when we are born into this life so that we might then freely choose whether or not we want to return to God forever. Our life is intended to be a journey back to God, a journey back to Love. We were born for love. We were made from and for love. We were created to dwell forever in the divine Love, but whether we end up there or not depends on whether we accept God’s offer of a share in the divine life.

Life is a beautiful and profound and mysterious drama in which our ultimate destiny, our eternal destiny, hinges on our choice of whether to say Yes or No to Love and to love. The stakes couldn’t be higher. So why does God leave the choice up to us? Again, it’s because love, to be genuine, has to be both freely offered and freely accepted. God doesn’t work by force, but rather by persuasion. God freely offers us the gift of a share in the divine life and love, but it’s up to each of us to choose whether to accept the gift or not. We’re all enrolled in the school of love, but it’s up to each of us whether we make the most of the opportunity or choose to drop out.