"Our God is a consuming fire," the prophet told us. Today we might say that our God is unlimited energy, a nuclear explosion that never ends. It is unlimited because its force is in God and is God. Divine love is real power, but the very reverse of control or manipulation. It is the power to give without interruption and without end. Like the sun, it never stops radiating energy, light, and life giving power. Even though everybody closes the curtains to hide the sun, it continues to pour itself out. The sun is a good image of God as a consuming fire. Divine love is the pouring out of light, life and love without interruption, nor is it the least bit discouraged by any kind of resistance. It keeps coming.
To love as Jesus loved is to love with Divine love, with the love of the persons of the Trinity, which is total self-surrender. They love not in order to receive love in return, but because it is the nature of Divine love to give, to pour itself out, to surrender, and to do so for no other reason than because it is what it is---sheer gift. We too must love not in order to become something but because we are called to be stewards of this Divine love, to be identified with it and to be channels for this immense energy, till the world is transformed by Christ and he is all in all. We surrender not because we choose to, but because Jesus has chosen us and commanded us to love as he has loved us.
Thomas Keating
Of all that God has shown me, I can speak just the smallest word. Not more than a honeybee takes on her foot, from an overspilling jar.
Mechthild of Magdeburg
But notice this, that love is not really one of man's powers. Humankind cannot achieve love, generate love, wield love, as we do our powers of destruction and creation. When I love someone, it is not something that I have achieved, but something that is happening through me, something that is is happening to me as well as to the person I love. To use the old soap opera cliche seriously, it is something bigger than both of us, infinitely bigger, because wherever love enters the world, God enters.
Albert Einstein
If God's incomprehensibility does not grip us in a word, if it does not draw us into his superluminous darkness, if it does not call us out of the little house of our homely, closehugged truths, we have misunderstood the words of Christianity.
Karl Rahner
Love, suffering for love of God, and the world, raises the dead. Pure unselfish love, aching and longing for the realm of God on earth, heals and saves. Love, anguishing for the imprisoned, yearning for the lost, passes through locked doors. Love, brave and true, plunges into a broken and sinful world and leaves a path of light for others to walk to safety. Love, so amazing, so divine. And you know what is even more amazing? Ordinary people like you do it every day.
Loretta Ross Gotta
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