God is Love

God is not a man or a woman. God is not a Christian or Jew or a Muslim or a Hindu or a Buddhist. God is love, pure unconditional love; a love that knows each of us by name; a love that sends us into life, and walks alongside us holding our hand.

God whispers to us in the flowers, in the song of a morning bird, in a kiss between lovers, in the smile of a friend. We experience God’s presence in the people we love, the friends we work with, in the ordinary water that flows though the fabric of our life, we just have to be listening.

When we experience unconditional love, we are in the presence of God. When we love someone unconditionally, God is acting through us. We try to represent God in words and pictures, in symbols and stained glass windows. But God cannot be framed in mental images. God cannot be described in human words. Saint John tells us in the New Testament that God is love. Everything else we attribute to God is a semantic analogy, a metaphor to help our limited human minds grasp this one reality – God is love.

When I baptize a child, I always tell the mom and dad that the greatest work they will ever do is to teach their child about God. And they will teach their child the reality of God not with words, not with books, but by loving that child unconditionally.  Because when a little child is loved that way, he or she knows in the depths of every cell of his or her being what love is – what God is. And by receiving that love, that child will walk through life with God close by his or her side; and that child in turn will be a conduit of God’s unconditional love for all those people with whom he or she interacts.

Someone once asked Jesus what the greatest commandment is – what is the most important thing that we were called to do with our lives. His answer was very clear: Love God with your whole heart and soul and love your neighbor as yourself.

God is love. In the words of the songwriter Carole King: Only love is real, everything else an illusion.