MikePaschall.com

How do we love God? We have put our emphasis on trying to love God, which is probably a good way to start—although we do not have a clue how to do that. What I consistently find in the mystics is an overwhelming experience of how God has loved them. God is always the initiator, God is the doer, God is the one who seduces us. All we can do is respond in kind and, exactly as Meister Eckhart said,

“The love by which we love God is the very same love with which God has first loved us.”

The mystics’ overwhelming experiences are full body blows of the Divine loving them, God radically accepting them. And they spend the rest of their lives trying to verbalize those experiences, invariably finding ways to give that love back through forms of service, compassion, and nonstop worship. But none of this is to earn God’s love; it’s always and only to return God’s love. Love is repaid by love alone.

      —Adapted from Following the Mystics Through the Narrow Gate…. Seeing God in All Things, by Richard Rohr O.F.M.

If we’re really paying attention to the love that God has for us (beyond mere consideration of salvation—for us and humanity) and relating to the massive reality of what it means to exist (mind, body, and spirit)… along with our amazing capacities to absorb and understand all the ways that God loves us… shouldn’t we be more prone to love others? Is it blasphemy that we don’t love who God loves… which is everyone? I suspect so.. on both counts. —MDP

1 John 4:20-21 – If you say you love God but hate your sister or brother, you are a liar. For you cannot love God, whom you have not seen, if you hate your neighbor, whom you have seen. If we love God, we should love our sisters and brothers as well; we have this commandment from God.

BELIEVE IT OR NOT… LOVE WINS.