Love of God as Created Good, Not Based on Lack

"The primary intentional relation of the self to its world is not theoretical reflection (Husserl) or pragmatic concern (Heidegger) but rather love (Augustine)." (p. 244)

"As such, human desire is not the result of a lack of privation but rather plentitude and excess – a positive movement toward God. Desire, then, is not the negative craving for a lack but the positive passion characteristic of love." (p. 244)

"‘When Bernard [of Clairvaux] asserts that humanity lost its likeness, he is saying that human desire is no longer in harmony with the desire from whence it came’ (Bell, Liberation Theology after the End of History p. 90-91). The fall was not the occasion for the advent of desire but rather the distortion and misdirection of the creational structure of desire." (p. 245)

"First, desire is located in God, and God cannot be characterized by lack of privation but only by plenitude. ‘God does not love us because God needs us to complete God’s own desire’ – and yet God does love us (CG, 77) A Christian theological1 account of desire ‘begins with God’s desire for me (a prerequisite for any doctrine of election and hence redemption)’ (TST, 187). Therefore, God’s desire does no operate according to a logic of privation, then two problematic scenarios would follow: Either the desire could never be satisfied, in which case we could never achieve peace and rest, or the desire would be satisfied, in which case eternity would shut down (contra Gregory of Nyssa’s picture in his commentary on Song of Songs). ‘There is a profound difference between participating in God and a need for God. In the Christian tradition.’ Ward notes, ‘God is not there to fulfill human demands. For that is to treat God as we might treat any other commodity in the marketplace’ (CG, 77). Here we see a marked difference between a properly Christian account of desire and the erotic paradigm adopted by contemporary evangelical worship, which operates according to a logic of privation and construes God as yet another commodity to satisfy a lack." (p. 246)

"The erotic structure of the creature can take different directions, and these different intentions are the products of the formation of desire by particular stories narrated by particular communities and enacted by particular disciplines. RO is concerned to analyze the specific forms of desire produced by different communities and to articulate the antithesis between these and the church as the site for authentic eros." (p. 247)

James K.A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy

Fear of the Lord('s love)

"'Oh,' the preist said, 'that's another thing altogether - god is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.'"

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory p. 199-200

Reciprocal Love Without Subordination

"We know that at the deepest levels of interpersonal relationships - of friend with friend, of man and woman in love - there is always the longing for complete mutual understanding. But we know that it is never in fact complete, and never wholly free from the danger that on subordinates the other, uses the other, manipulates the other. Can there ever be complete reciprocity, or is this an unattainable ideal to be striven for but never reached? Is it a mirage or a reality that can be reached? The Christian testimony is that it is a reality within the being of the Triune God."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p.89

Miraculous Vision

"Father Vaillant began pacing reslessly up and down as he spoke, and the Bishop watched him, musing. It was just this in his friend that was dear to him. 'Where there is great love there are always miracles,' he said at length. 'One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.'"

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1993 Modern Library edition p. 56

No Such Thing as Safe Love or Ethics

"No ethic is worthy that does not require potentially the suffering of those we love. Nothing cuts against liberal ethical sentimentality more than this. We wish that there were some means of holding convictions without requiring the suffering of our friends and families. We try to make 'love' an individual emotion that does not ask someone else to suffer because of our love. Of course, such thinking makes activities like marriage and childbearing incomprehensible since these practices inextricably involve those we love suffering as part and parcel of our joint endeavors."

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 148

Love Even Your Spouse

"I have always assumed that one of the hardest aspects of Christianity is the admonition for Christians to love one another even if they are married."

Stanley Hauerwas from Knowing How to Go On When You Do Not Know Where You Are: A Response to John Cobb, Jr.

Killing With Kindness

"There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and when kindness ... is separated from the other elements of Love, it infolves a certain fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it. Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object - we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. As scripture points out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitimate sons, who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished."

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain p. 36

Knowing Forgiveness

"It seems we need someone to know us as we are - with all we have done - and forgive us. We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone's sight: Know this about me, and yet love me. Please."

Sue Miller in While I Was Gone, p. 261

Love Enduring Rejection

"Having children teaches you, I think, that love can survive your being despised in every aspect of yourself. That you need not collapse when the shriek comes: Don't you get it? I hate you! But you do need to get it. You do need to understand and accept being hated. I think this is one of the greatest gifts children can give you, as long as it doesn't last."

Sue Miller, in While I Was Gone, p. 232

Loving, Painful Memory

"But pain may be a gift to us. ... Remember, after all, that pain is one of the ways we register in memory the things that vanish, that are taken away. We fix them in our minds forever by yearning, by pain, by crying out. Pain, the pain that seems unbearable at the time, is memory's first imprinting step, the cornerstone of the temple we erect inside us in memory of the dead. Pain is part of memory, and memory is a God-given gift"

Sue Miller in While I Was Gone p. 109

Happiness Enough

"We were married six weeks later, and I would say we have lived happily, if not ever after, at least enough of the time since. There are always compromises, of course, but they are at the heart of what it means to be married. They are, occasionally, everything"

Sue Miller in While I Was Gone p. 95

Love's Presumption to Eternity

"Why does love feel it is - know for certain it is - eternal and absolute, every time? He opened a notebook and found a passage he had copied from Kafka's letters to Felice. 'I have no crazier and greater wish than that we should be bound together inseparably by the wrists.' Of course Kafka wrote letters to Felice only when they were apart. Love letters do not so much document daily love's long hours as precede them."

Annie Dillard in The Maytrees p. 128

Love's Shocking Uniqueness

"After they married she learned to feel their skin as double-sided. They felt a pause. Theirs was too much feeling to push through the crack that led down to the dim world of time and stuff. That world was gone. They held themselves alert only in those few million cells where they touched. She learned from those cells his awareness and his courtesy. Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again."

Annie Dillard in The Maytrees p. 31

Bickering In Love

"We quarreled because we loved each other, I have no doubt of that. We were trying to become somehow the same person, one flesh, and we often failed. When distance came between us, we would blame it on each other. And here is a wonder. I maybe never loved him so much or yearned toward him so much as when I was mad at him. It's not a simple thing, this love."

Wendell Berry in Hannah Coulter p. 109