Our first experience of God is so important, we either experience Him as the police guard that wants to punish or as Creative Love that awaits.
– Pope Benedict XVI
I think in our American culture, so focused on ME that we too often forget about the OTHER, the idea of an objectively real and personal God somehow feels like an affront to our freedom, our reason, and individuality. God? Oh, right. Him again? The Big Landlord? Believing in Him means joining the rank and file and stifling the fun. It means losing your spontaneity and intellectual freedom because every Sunday you have to blindly “pay the rent.” Or pay for “fire insurance,” as some glibly joke. But this is ridiculously simplistic.
In our deepest being we all know that we were not made for laws. We were made for love.
“Once God is forgotten… the creature itself grows unintelligible.”
– Gaudium et Spes
Is God Love? Is it just Law? Well, ask God. Let Him in, and you’ll discover you have an infinite capacity for Him. And if God is truly a Person, a Communion of Persons, in fact, then how else could we actually know Him unless we let Him into the heart? I don’t think my way through relationships with people, I don’t reason out the issues at stake, mentally prep myself to fall in love. “On September 24, 2009 at precisely 9:37am I will fall in love.” No, I reach out and speak words. I open the mind and let down the guard a bit with the one standing before me. I listen, wait, gaze long and let myself be looked upon. That look builds a relationship. Why should this be any different with God?
Prayer can progress, as a genuine dialogue of love, to the point of rendering the person wholly possessed by the divine Beloved, vibrating at the Spirit’s touch, resting filially within the Father’s heart. This is the lived experience of Christ’s promise: “He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.”
– Pope John Paul II, Novo Millennio Ineunte 33