Christian Viewpoint: Instinctive response to being loved unconditionally is to love others with equal, generous abandon
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
Recently, I was chatting to someone about God’s unconditional love, writes John Dempster. As we spoke I was filled with the utter joy of being loved and cherished, no matter what, by a Love unshakable and unchanging.
I am prone to focus on negative things, and what I sometimes regard as my failures and inadequacy. I am prone to disturbance by bitter, critical thoughts. But the sense of being loved silences this negativism, stills my fears, calms my mind. I become confident, joyful and free.
After that reawakening to the wonder of God’s love, I took our dog Ezra out for a walk.
Normally, caught up in my own agenda, I’m impatient of his frequent stops to sniff lamp-posts, and squirt his own territorial markers.
To still my impatience, I try to focus on mindfulness, concentrating on the natural things around me, but this is simply another item on my ego’s agenda, and doesn’t work for long.
The instinctive response to being loved unconditionally is to love others with equal, generous abandon.
Knowing myself so loved by God, I found I could set the ego agenda to one side: a sense of loving kindness stirred within. I found myself loving Ezra, with his bright eyes, soft fur, impetuous energy; loving the other dog-walkers; loving the gnarled tree-trunks, the low sun filtering through the leaves.
Later I came across this, said by a character in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov: “Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. If you love everything you will perceive the divine mystery in things.”
At times that week, I felt like a child again, hurrying expectantly outdoors with an awakened wonder. Everything seemed lovely, brand new, waiting to be explored.
This is not childishness, but the child-like innocence which lies on the far side of perplexity, a sense that the Great Love will win out, and that in this divine Love we are utterly secure.
This sense of being both held and set free by love isn’t something I can generate through words or rituals, or summon by prayer. It is a sheer gift, given when I least expect it.
And then the clarity evaporates, and I am left again in the afterglow, no longer experiencing the Love so intensely, but choosing to live in the light of being loved.
And how do I know that these moments of Love experienced are closer to reality than the times of Love seemingly absent? All I can say is that never do I find myself so complete, inwardly healed and love-filled as at those times when the Great Love whispers in my soul ‘You are my beloved.’
'God, if you exist you've got to help me'
