The Descent of Love
Read time: About 6 minutes
In distress and want I ask, “Where oh God are you?”
Here, I am as close to you as the warmth of your breath.
But this does not satisfy my mind, and so I ask again.
Here, in the confusions that make you trade life for death.
Still I ask what I have with my questions already said.
Here, in the doubts that rise against my descending truth.
And yet I am undone with deceptions old and new.
Here let me give myself to you with love alone that will soothe.
– Meister Eckhart, OP. (1260-1328)
Have we not all felt that question rise within us – ”Where oh God are you?!“? Have we not, at some times in our lives, felt alone, abandoned? Have we not feared that we are consigned to fend for ourselves in the seeming randomness that surrounds us?
Yet, is not God as close to us as the warmth of our breath? Is it not impossible to be otherwise?
In the delight of a baby’s laugh that tickles our ear, and the twinkle of starlight that catches our eye, is not God as close as these?
In the soft touch of the one’s who love us, and the beating of our heart within us, is not God as close as these? Is not God the cause of the breath we take? Is not God, invisible as our own breath, the warmth of reality that surrounds and sustains us?
And we are not satisfied.
We are never satisfied… nor can we be satisfied. We are flesh and God is Spirit. Yet, our true moments of joy and fulfillment are not from our material creations, they are born in love. They are of the moments and expressions of love and support and joy that we allow to touch us. They are gifted of Spirit. They multiply from one soul to another.
God is Love. God is everywhere and in everything, and so God’s love is also in our doubts. Our inability to comprehend Spirit and explain the unexplainable, can’t help but lead to our doubts. We know too well our shortcomings. We cloak our failures, lest we be exposed… as human.
We step back. Doubt enters. Certain knowledge of our compulsions, evidenced in our choices, confirm our weakness. We trade life for death. Neither intentional nor even conscious because the choice is so often, not so stark — not so clear that we recoil at what is before us… until it is done, and then we know too well.
The deaths we choose are also the thousand choices to not do something — the decisions of opportunity lost, of love not shared. It is said that the measure of a person is not what we do when we must do it, but what we do when we don’t have to do anything.
Yet God is there. We fear that we offend God because all that we know of love is human love, fragile and easily offended as it is. To believe God’s love is such, reduces the Love Of The Universe to our tiny little box of understanding — a level we fool ourselves into taking for granted, and think we can control.
Our doubt lives and breathes in our attempts to understand and control it because deep down inside, we know that if we can… what kind of God would that be?
Yet God is there, constantly showing us that although we hurt Love in the countless ways we fail to love, God’s love will not fail us. God’s love is beyond offence and cannot be withheld. God’s love cannot be controlled. The Universe itself is the explosion of God’s love that even the Trinity could not contain and hold for Itself, but was compelled to share.
And so God gives Godself to us over and over again and again. Offering what we can neither see nor touch, yet is the only thing we can feel – the only thing that brings fulfillment and peace.
The offering was made visible on the Cross. The unbreakable fidelity to Love was proven in the blood and pain of a broken Man. The truth of God’s inability to withhold God’s love is there for us to see.
As darkness is impossible when there is light, God’s love withheld is an equal impossibility. God’s essence and Spirit is offered for the world to see — not to understand what is beyond understanding, but to make a choice: accept what is freely offered, or turn away — to either allow God to fill the God-size hole in our hearts, or to endlessly evade what is endlessly offered. That offering alone is the truth that soothes.
For God to do otherwise would be an impossible contradiction.