“Love” by Richard
Rohr
The Most Essential Thing
Sunday, October 28, 2018
Sunday, October 28, 2018
The most powerful, most needed, and most essential teaching
is always Love. Love is our foundation and our destiny. It is where we come
from and where we’re headed. As St. Paul famously says, “So faith, hope, and
love remain, but the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13).
My hope, whenever I speak or write, is to help clear away
the impediments to receiving, allowing, trusting, and participating in a
foundational Love. God’s love is planted inside each of us as the Holy Spirit
who, according to Jesus, “will teach you everything and remind you of all that
I told you” (John 14:26).
Love is who you are. When you don’t live according to love,
you are outside of being. You’re basically not real or true to yourself. When
you love, you are acting according to your deepest being, your deepest truth.
You are operating according to your dignity. For a simple description of the
kind of love I am talking about, let’s just use the word outflowing.
This will become clearer as we proceed.
All I can do is remind you of what you already know deep
within your True Self and invite you to live connected to this Source. John the
Evangelist writes, “God is love, and whoever remains in love, remains in God
and God in them” (1 John 4:16). The Judeo-Christian creation story says that we
were created in the very “image and likeness” of God—who sets the highest bar
for this kind of outflowing love (Genesis 1:26-27). Out of the Trinity’s
generative and infinitely flowing relationship, all of creation takes form,
mirroring its Creator in its deepest identity.
We have heard this phrase so often that we don’t get the
existential shock of what “created in the image and likeness of God” is saying
about us. If this is true, then our family of origin is divine. It is saying
that we were created by a loving God to also be love in the
world. Our core is original blessing, not original sin. Our starting point is
“very good” (Genesis 1:31). If the beginning is right, the rest is made
considerably easier, because we know and can trust the clear direction of our
life’s tangent.
We must all overcome the illusion of separateness. It is
the primary task of religion to communicate not worthiness but union, to
reconnect people to their original identity “hidden with Christ in God”
(Colossians 3:3). The Bible calls the state of separateness “sin.” God’s job
description is to draw us back into primal and intimate relationship. “My dear
people, we are already children of God; what we will be in the future has not
yet been fully revealed, and all I do know is that we shall be like God” (1
John 3:2).
Henceforth, all our moral behavior is simply “the imitation
of God.” First observe what God is doing all the time and everywhere, and then
do the same thing (Ephesians 5:1). And what does God do? God does what God is:
Love. God does not love you if and when you change. God loves
you so that you can change!
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