In early adolescence I was prone to sudden and intense crushes that seemed to arrive out of nowhere and hit like a ton of bricks. I would moon about and hover and eventually express my feelings enough to receive the universal gentle turn down of that place and time: “I like you, but as a friend.”
I suppose many of us have had that experience and are painfully aware of the numerous variations on that basic request for distance. Nobody I know got through adolescence unscathed.
I was watching a TV sitcom the other day in which this kind of situation was part of the plot. I remarked to my wife of over 47 years (Thank you Lord, for delivering us from dating!) that there was probably very little as painful to young humans as there is to realize they are in a relationship with vastly different levels of love on the two sides.
Then I thought about the fundamental asymmetry of love between us and God, between us and every member of the Holy Trinity. And I began to wonder how many times I’ve attempted to put God into the ‘Friend Zone.’
It is impossible to absorb or visualize the extent of God’s love for us. But one sunny Spring morning I got what might be a glimpse of it on my way to Mass, walking across a vibrantly green lawn sparkling with dewdrops. I invite you to join me on that walk.
The Foundation of Creation
All around us the sunshine is striking matter, warming it and raising its temperature. Imagine the energy being absorbed by molecules, their Brownian motion increasing. Inside the molecules the atoms dance, electrons responding to photons.
Deep in the locus of those same atoms quarks vibrate, holding fast together. They are the building blocks of matter as far as we can tell at this time. All around us are unimaginable, uncountable numbers of particles, interrupting the void with form and substance. This is the foundation of creation.
Let your imagination expand skyward, 94 million miles out. There is the sun, a maelstrom of heat and pressure forcing hydrogen atoms together to make helium and release energy, fusing the helium to lithium, breaking the lithium into other elements.
Stars are the forge of creation, transmuting elemental hydrogen into light and heat and stardust. This stardust is scattered at the death of suns and swept up to make planets and worlds unknown.
A Flood of Energy
The sun, small though it may be on a cosmic scale, is almost inconceivably huge in human terms. And it is releasing torrents of energy in all directions. Most of this energy radiates out into empty space, warming nothing. It attenuates over countless light-years to join other stars’ contributions as faint points of light in the night sky of other worlds. A small fraction of this light and energy radiates out along the ecliptic plane, the home of our sun’s planets.
Of this small fraction of light and energy, only a tiny bit lands on us and our sister planets at any time. Our world swims through this great sea of energy, of life giving light and warmth, taking in only a tiny part of the whole being produced. Our enclave of life is sustained by a demitasse spoon of light, dipped from the torrent of a great river that is itself only a trickle into the great ocean that receives its rushing waters.
A Glimpse Of The Magnitude Of Love
But our sun is only one of an uncountable number of stars spread throughout creation. All of them are spilling out light in immeasurable abundance.
God’s love is like this. It is an abundant love and grace that surrounds us and floods over us. It is a profligate, extravagant love that fills and sustains all of creation, more than we can ever individually grasp or perceive.
God’s love is there for us, for the whole universe, more than we can use, more than can ever be used. It is plentiful to a degree that surpasses the mere idea of plenty. It is abundant beyond every dream or desire.
That’s a lot of love! But this description still falls short of the reality of God’s infinite love for us.
The Discomfort Of Being Loved
Receiving love honestly can be both joy-filled and burdensome.
Most of us know what it feels like to be deeply in love – the vulnerability, the desire to lower defenses and be completely available to the beloved. To understand the feeling is to be painfully aware of how much power our behavior wields over another – how a thoughtless word or act can cause great pain, pain we did not intend to inflict.
The agonies of adolescence train us to guard our hearts and, as much as possible, govern our love for others to avoid being hurt. In this same way we become more vigilant about how others feel toward us. We instinctively put distance between ourselves and people who seem to be drawing too close too fast. For a mature, responsible person the only thing as painful as being told “I like you, but as a friend” is having to say it, and then dealing with the guilt and self-reproach for not having somehow managed to head it off early in the process.
This leaves us with some discomfort even in mature, balanced love relationships. The fear of loving or being loved disproportionately, and the fear of being or giving hurt, never really fades. Ask any 50-year veteran of marriage how love ebbs and flows, enlivens and frustrates…and sometimes frightens at different times in the relationship.
Simply put, we are most comfortable when the love in a relationship is mutual and balanced. We become progressively less comfortable when one lover’s love massively outweighs the others.
Knowing that God’s love is infinite while our own is limited even at our best, one can see the basis for some discomfort.
Why We Fear Infinite Love
We generally understand that how we approach God is conditioned by our life experiences. Our sense of God The Father will be, at some point, influenced by our experience of our earthly father (or these days, with families broken and remade regularly, fathers).
Our experiences of love condition our approach to God as well.
If we have experienced devouring, smothering love, we may fear infinite love as a force that might snuff out our sense of self. If we have experienced controlling love covering for abuse, we may fear infinite love as annihilating. And if we experience love as a something that requires us to respond responsibly, protectively, equally, then the fear of what infinite love might demand might be outright terrifying.
Even if we have experienced love as overwhelmingly positive and always managed to live up to the responsibility of being loved adequately, we might still fear infinite love as so overwhelming that we could become lost in it, unable to find ourselves as individuals.
These are human fears, often expressed in the bible by those who encounter God closely, fearing that they will lose their lives from the very proximity of God—or even his angels.
How much safer must it feel to try to fit God into the ‘Friend Zone,’ where we hope to substitute liking for love.
God’s Love Is Infinite & Perfect
Unfortunately for our timidity, God doesn’t really fit into the friend zone. Being without sin, God is without pride, and so will accept from us whatever response we are capable of giving. But like any determined lover, he hopes to win us over more and more.
Again, our human experience misleads us about what this means. Our experience of people who love us more than we love them runs from the temporarily annoying to the level of restraining-order peril (though what causes the latter is not really love, the devouring pursuit overwhelms semantic precision).
But God’s love is not just infinite, it is perfect. His love does not overpower. Perfect love does not coerce nor does perfect love devour. Perfect love nurtures and nourishes, accepts and cherishes.
As St. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 –
Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, [love] is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.
When we fear love, it is not Heaven we fear, but humanity and our past experiences, and perhaps the lies of the enemy.
Moving Out Of The ‘Friend Zone’
So how do we move our relationship with God out of the ‘Friend Zone?’
As with so many things in our relationship with God, it does not so much require doing as undoing – letting go.
The first thing to realize is that wanting to grow closer to God in any way – improving our prayer life, amending our lifestyles, attending Mass more often, being more attuned to God’s will, experiencing God’s presence and love more fully – all of these desires are themselves the first step. They are all gifts that come from the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, prompting us to move forward. As the old hymn says,
I sought the Lord
But afterwards I knew
He moved my soul
to seek him, seeking me
We would not want to draw closer if God were not inviting us to do so, knowing that we are ready to move by knowing us as only he can. The things we have to do are things we already know. Make more time for prayer. Spend more time reading scripture and books about sound doctrine, holy lives, holy living – perhaps even weekly visits to Catholic Stand and similar sources of information and inspiration. Go to Mass, regularly.
But all these things are, in the end, methods we can use to get out of God’s way! We are his beloved children; and all we have to do to know him better is to quit our own particular ways of telling him we like him and all, but just as a friend. In doing so we give up a little. But in exchange we receive the infinite.
