Love God

Love the Lord your God with your whole heart, and with your whole mind, and with your whole strength (Deut. 6:5).

Jesus told the Pharisees that this is the "first and greatest commandment" -- the commandment to love God spirit, soul, and body-- with our whole being.  And how then can God command us to "love" Him?  Can any one of us "command" others to "love" us? 

God wants us to belong entirely to Him, to cling to Him, to breathe Him in as our breath of life.  He wants to possess us, spirit, soul, and body.  We, on the other hand, want to possess Him -- that is, we want to reduce Him to something we can comprehend.  We want to confine Him within the narrow limits of our own understanding and definitions. 

One definition of hell might be that all of the mysteries of the universe and of God Himself are reduced to the limits of my own spirit, my mind, and my body.  If I do not comprehend something, it doesn't exist, or it's not true:  mine, mine, mine.  We want to "possess," or "own" -- and thereby control -- all that we can.

Only in love do we move out of the prison of our own selves into the incomprehensible mystery of the "Other."  And if the Other is infinite, we continually expand the narrowness of our own souls in flowing out of ourselves into Him.  When we love God, we become infinite like He is, always moving out of ourselves into Him.  Catherine of Siena said, God is He Who Is; Catherine is she who is not.

When we freely give ourselves away, no longer claiming spirit, soul, and body as "ours" but "Yours," we become more than we can even ask or imagine --- we find ourselves being transformed into His likeness, "from glory to glory" (2 Cor. 3:18).   God commands us to love Him so that He can mold us into His character:  light from Light.

First we love (Spirit to spirit); then we understand (Mind to mind);  and finally we are transformed into His likeness (Body to body).  If we seek to reverse the order, confining the Infinite into the finiteness of our own understanding before we give ourselves completely to Him, we will never love Him, but only our ideas of who He is.  We will still "own" ourselves: ye shall be as gods.

If we could only take the first and greatest commandment as our rule of life, we might see everything differently.  We make all of our decisions in life as if we "owned" ourselves, but what if we saw ourselves as belonging entirely to the Most High?  Can we imagine God commanding us, as His servants, to cheat others, to abort our children, to tear down and not build up?

What if, in every circumstance, we bowed before the Lord and said, "I belong to You; tell me what You would have me do!"  We would need no other commandments or laws if we loved the Lord with our whole hearts, our whole minds, and our whole strength.