Killing God With Love: True Confession
I have no idea what loving God looks like, never mind loving with all my heart, soul and mind.
Every time I sit down to write about Jesus’ response to the querulous lawyer’s question, “Which commandment in the law is the greatest?” I am stopped dead in my tracks. (See full text below) I have no idea what loving God looks like, never mind loving with all my heart, soul and mind. I feel salty and scrappy and I do not want to engage this text. Which of course is a very strong indication that this is precisely what I must do.
I have been sitting down, standing up, walking around and wondering for days, “what can I possibly say?” about this love commanding text until I finally give up. The truth is, I have nothing to say about loving God. I have not a single thought nor feeling about it. Frankly, the question annoys me. So I do what I do whenever I am really stuck.
Close the laptop. Leave my study. Take out the old leather bound journal, a pointy pencil, sit in my prayer chair and with a fair share of attitude initiate a conversation. “OK God, I cannot do this. I have nothing to say about love of God or anything else. What have you to say about this business of loving God with heart, soul and mind? I have no clue what this love is supposed to be.” Medium length pause. “Be still. Bring your head to your heart.” Yikes! My voice is echoing in my heart. I have preached and counseled countless others using exactly those words. “Put your head in your heart.”
I close my eyes and sink into the center of my being. It is unusually effortless today. Almost immediately I feel a sting behind my sternum. A painless piercing, hot but not too hot, steady yet vibrating. After a time two questions arise. “What if I accept the words, “I love you” without plumbing them for meaning, demanding definition, a bulleted list of best practices and a strategic action plan? What if I let myself rest in the painless piercing in the cave of my heart and simply accept it as love?” What novel possibilities!
So I put down the journal, set a timer for twenty minutes and direct my attention to the sensation penetrating the place of my heart. It is not long before I notice my mind leaping from mundane duties to be done this day to mulling over moot moments long gone by. I wonder, “What if loving God with all my mind means refusing to be distracted by the past that is, well, past and the future that actually does not exist in order to sustain focus in my heart right now? What if loving God is tasting the cool air on my tongue and the steady slipstream of sun on my toes? What if loving God means anchoring my mind to the painless piercing in my heart?”
“OK God, this feels good and right, the inside out kind of knowing about loving with all my mind. But soul? Love God with all my soul? I have no idea what is the soul, never mind how to love with it.” Again I notice my mind leap to turn off the meditation timer, go to the Blue Letter Bible and find the Strong’s G definition of the Greek word for soul. How better can I figure this out? “Whoa Debra, where have you gone? Clearly you have abandoned the cave of your heart.”
Bent to my knees again, I remember I cannot do this. I cannot figure out what is soul and how to love with it. And so I give up and return to the painless piercing of my heart. It is not long before I ‘hear,’ “Soul is the home of the un-manifest I AM manifesting the small I am through my particular faculties, emotions, desires and aversions. (Better write that down.) Soul is the deathless essence of me that bridges being and nonbeing. Like a natural spring effervescing, soul surges as living water through the manifest ground of my heart until it returns to the un-manifest ground of I AM.” Somehow I know this is truly so although I cannot explain it. I rest until there is no I and no resting place.
Loving God with all my heart, soul and mind, I disappear without being annihilated in that which informs every cell and space of my seemingly separate self. From the Source and Substance of which I am, I am never separate. And, here is an interesting twist. When I am wholly absorbed in deathless Substance and Source it seems God also disappears. So I wonder, is love the killing ground of God? I better stop right here.
Today it is enough to say, I have experienced love. No explanation required.
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Learn more about me at https://www.debraasis.org/ All words are generated by grace and the grit of a real human being. Debra Asis
Matthew 22:34–46 When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “`You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: `You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question: “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” They said to him, “The son of David.” He said to them, “How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying, `The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet”’ If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?” No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.
