The words “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is One” have been familiar to me for longer than I can remember. Of course, I tend to remember them better in the original Hebrew that I learned to chant as soon as I could talk, and Jesus seems to have learned a different version of the next sentence than I did, because he adds “mind” to the “heart, soul, and might” that I memorized as a child.* But all of that is beside the point, which is that we are supposed to love God with everything that we are and everything that we have.
And that, for me, is the sticking point. I confess that I have a lot of trouble loving God. I can just barely manage to believe that God loves me, but to love God back always feels like a stretch. The God who spoke the universe into being, who keeps everything going, who creates, sustains, and pervades every tiny particle that exists is just too big, too transcendent, too impossible to know, let alone love.
When I think of love, I think of that heart-wrenching, slightly teary, overwhelming feeling that often came over me when my children were little; that came back with doubled force when I saw my daughter holding her newborn son; and now washes over me when I hear the voice of my now teen-aged grandson calling me “gramma.” Love is what I feel for my spouse when I think of all the years we have been together, all the adventures that we have shared, and all the ways that he supports and encourages me to live out my dreams. Love is what I feel for my friends, as we sit over a meal telling each other our joys, our challenges, and our yearnings; as we shake our heads over the latest news; as we trust our friendship even through disagreements and misunderstandings. Love is what I feel when my heart expands as I look at a particularly gnarled, old tree whose roots have pushed up through the sidewalk, breaking the concrete in its need to grow and stretch; when my breath catches at the sight of some carefully planted flowers in front of a run-down house; or the thrill I feel when the sky at dusk is that magical color between blue and purple and I can just make out the first stars against the fading sunlight. I love all of God’s creation, one immediate, perceptible, created thing or person at a time.
Still, I don’t know how to love the infinite, transcendent, unfathomable God who is beyond all names and all descriptions. All I can do is stand in awe of a God who makes oceans and thunderstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, tornadoes and forests and deserts and mountains, stars and galaxies and atoms and quarks and all the other things that I will never truly understand. So I am grateful for all the stories about Jesus, who gives me a way to love God in human form when he tells me to love my neighbors as myself. I’m not as good at loving either my neighbors or myself as I’d like to be, either, but at least I know how to start.
–Deborah Sokolove, Seekers Church
Questions
- Who or what do you love?
- What does it mean to you to love someone or something?
- How is loving God like or unlike loving a part of God’s creation?
