They say God is Love. Yet I don’t feel God in my life. So what does that say about the presence of Love in my life?
So often I have wondered at the paradoxes of Christianity. So often I have wondered how I can simultaneously love God and yet feel God is absent. And through it all, what does this say about the nature of Love and the nature of God?
It wasn’t until encountering the mystics (most notably St. John of the Cross) that I began to realize that these paradoxes are normal. For the mystics and the saints, it seems the most natural thing in the world to hold two or more realities in tension, recognizing that God is bigger than our dualistic imaginings of who God is and what God is doing in this world and in our hearts.
In St. John of the Cross’s work The Spiritual Canticle, we find a dialogue between a Lover and the Beloved. There is a pursuit of the Bridegroom (Christ) by the Bride (the soul). While it is a beautiful depiction of the raptures of Love, there is also a lot of pain present in the poem’s stanzas. A paradox in the nature of Love. A paradox in the nature of God.
Many mystics think of Love as a wound. This is rather opposite of the way many of us like to think of Love. We tend to think of the warm, fuzzy emotions that go with loving another. We think of the tenderness, the restorative powers, the way that Love is inextricably bound together with Faith and Hope. Very rarely do we think of the pain Love causes.
And yet this seems to be where I am. Love feels more and more like a wound each day. I cry out into a vast nothingness, cry out for the Beloved of my life and all I find is the absence of God. As my Love for God beats in my chest anew each day, I also experience the aridity of longing for more and begging, “Come, Lord Jesus.” And so I angrily accuse alongside St. John of the Cross:
“Why, after wounding
This heart, have You not healed it?
And why, after stealing it,
Have You thus abandoned it,
And not carried away the stolen prey?”
Love, I am finding, is indeed a paradox. The One who could heal all of me… heart, mind, body, soul… is also the One who wounds me. I desire to be near to the Beloved, and yet as of now there is a gap between us. And the pursuit of God has left me nothing but hungry for God in the places I have yet to find traces of God.
So why, God? Why create these paradoxes? Why wound me by allowing this loving pursuit while seemingly dodging all my efforts for connection and intimacy? Why would you steal my heart away from this world only to allow my heart to experience the barrenness of loneliness and the absence of You, my Beloved?
Even in the midst of the questions, in the midst of the angry and downcast “why’s” of life and Love, St. John of the Cross shows us yet another paradox. The one of Faith. As Paul reminds us, Faith, Hope, and Love are all bound together, and so it is little surprise to find that we experience yet another paradox here. St. John of the Cross continues his poem with the faith of one that also has hope in the Beloved.
“Quench my troubles,
For no one else can soothe them; and
Let my eyes behold You,
For You are their light,
And I will keep them for You alone.”
Faith moves forward in Hope, all the while keeping Love as the focal point. Though the heart has been wounded by Love, Faith keeps on believing in the restorative powers of that Love. Though the soul longs for the Beloved and feels the absence of the Beloved so pointedly, Faith keeps the soul hoping in presence and praying for union.
This is not where I am. I see more clearly the wound of Love. I feel more poignantly the agonizing aridity of the soul in search of that which is wholly Other. I struggle to continue to have Faith and Hope, because the Love that exists within me seems to be like Ezekiel’s dry bones. Tapped dry of purpose, left discarded to the elements of life. But I am called onward, beckoned forward into a faith that is great only in its mustard seed size. Through people like St. John of the Cross, I am reminded that the breath of God did indeed breathe life back into those same dry bones, and by Faith, I will see the dead dryness of my own life breathed into life everlasting.
Everything falls away in the raptures of Love for God. This world passes away and is simultaneously brought into newness and glory. All is engulfed in the Living Flame of Love for the Creator of all, even the Creator of me and of you. And in that splendid fire we will be transformed so that the Beloved is in all we see, for our eyes are for God alone.