How to Love God

prayers, home chapel

It is all very well to say that the first and most important of the commandments is that ‘we should love God with our whole minds and hearts and  with our whole bodies and souls and with our whole strength’, but the question is, how to do it?

When I first decided to take this commandment seriously  I had just fallen in love for the first time, and I simply could not conceive loving God with my whole heart and mind and with my whole being as I had come to love my girlfriend. Compared with her, God seemed so abstract, so distant, so far away.

“That is precisely why God became man so that we could love him in Jesus,” my parish priest explained to me. The trouble was I had difficulty with the idea of loving another man, even if he was the Son of God — at least not as I had recently come to understand the word ‘love.’ It might do for girls, I thought, but it would not do for me.

Guided by the Catholic Catechism

Then I came across a book on scripture that seemed to resolve my difficulties. It explained how in the Old Testament, God was said to be endowed with feminine as well as male characteristics. It showed how some of the Fathers of the Church spoke of what they called the anima and the animus in God.  In other words, God is neither male nor female, but the qualities of male-ness and female-ness can be found uniquely balanced and brought to perfection in him. These same qualities must therefore be found in Jesus Christ, in whom the fullness of the Father’s love is to be found here on earth. That is why in responding to his love, men and women can respond equally, if differently, and both ultimately find their completion in him. As the Catholic Catechism states,  

By calling God Father, the language of faith indicates two main things: that God is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority; and that he is at the same time goodness and loving care for all his children. God’s parental tenderness can also be expressed by the image of motherhood, which emphasizes God’s immanence, the intimacy between Creator and creature. The language of faith thus draws on the human experience of parents, who are in a way the first representatives of God for man (CCC 239).

I decided to study Jesus Christ more and more deeply so that I could come to love him, and in loving him come to experience the only love that  I knew could change me permanently for the better. This led me to a new form of prayer called meditation in the Christian Tradition. The first disciples of Jesus who knew him personally came to love him from the start. However, the second generation of Christians who did not encounter him personally themselves listened to the recollections of the first generation,  and read and committed to memory all that they had written about Jesus Christ. This created a treasury of personal information about Jesus, enabling them to come to know and love him, as the first disciples did. This led them onward into him, into his glorified body, and into his mystical contemplation of God the Father.

A New form of Meditation

This was a completely new understanding of meditation that superseded what previous religions practised in both the East and the West. For Hindus in the East for instance and Gnostics in the West and later Neoplatonists, meditation primarily entails mastering mental techniques that would, they believed, enable them to encounter and experience the utterly transcendent God. Their encounter with him would be predominantly an intellectual or a mental encounter, in which they sought to attain esoteric knowledge.

The by-product of this meditation often resulted in psychological states of inner peace that have been wrongly identified with the mystical contemplation described in the Christian tradition by such saints as St Teresa of Avila in her masterwork Interior Castle. In the  Christian tradition meditation took on a far more profound and genuinely religious form because unlike any previous or subsequent religions, it depended on love, not on the search for intellectual enlightenment or abstruse forms of mystical knowledge. St John was clear that God is love, and only through love can we find love and then enter into him.

For Christians therefore there is only one way to Union with God and that is by coming to know and love Him by coming to know and love his Son, made flesh and blood in Jesus Christ. For as Jesus said at the Last Supper “I am in the Father and the Father is in me”. We pursue our search for union with God, therefore, by meditating on those memories of Jesus Christ as contained in the writings of those who knew him personally; not just because their memories were unique, but because their memories, and the way they wrote them down in the scriptures,  were inspired by the Holy Spirit.

The Main Reason for Reading the Scriptures

There are manifold reasons why a person might choose to read the scriptures, but there is only one reason for the person who wants to come to know and love God, and that is to come to know and love Jesus Christ, in whose flesh and blood God chose to make his love present, through the Incarnation.

Choose for your meditation therefore those parts of the scriptures in which Christ can be seen manifesting his love in all that he says and does.  Having read and re-read the sacred texts, it is time to reflect on them in deep Christian Meditation. Pore over them again and again, ruminate on them, as Saint Augustine would say; allow the inner meaning of every word to seep deep down into the very marrow of your being so that their dynamic impact can register with effect.

Begin by setting the scene in your imagination. Picture the apostles preparing the table for the Last Supper, for instance, see Christ coming into the room; watch the way he moves; look into his face when he speaks; then mull over his every word, trying to penetrate their inner meaning.

The same sort of scene-setting could be used to build up the atmosphere before meditating on other Gospel texts. The Passion of Christ, for instance, would lend itself to this method of praying. Do not just think of what Christ went through in your mind, go back in your imagination and place yourself in the event. You are amongst the soldiers at the scourging, one of the crowd during the carrying of the cross, an onlooker at the actual crucifixion. You see everything as it happens, you open your ears and hear what is said, and then you open your mouth and begin to pray.

This is not Pious Fantasy

We are not dealing with pious fantasy here, but with the most momentous historical events in human history. The Word was made flesh precisely so that people of flesh and blood could understand and see God’s love made tangible. Christ’s death was a brutal and painful reality through which the Word, who was made flesh, speaks of love in a way that is intelligible to all. To neglect the Passion as a primary source of Christian meditation and prayer is to neglect the most important manifestation of God’s love that ever took place.

Gradually in many months the slow meditation on the sacred texts suddenly begins to bear fruit; the spiritual understanding begins to stir and the emotions are touched and begin to react. What began as rather dry academic knowledge about God changes and begins to strike with an ever-deepening impact. Knowledge begins to turn into love, as the love that God has for us begins to register with effect. Nobody can remain the same when they realize that another loves them. We respond automatically, the emotions are released, and we begin to express our love and thanks in return.

From Meditation to Contemplation

As the experience of coming to know and love Christ begins to explode with maximum effect, you will find that even the most extravagant words do not sufficiently voice the depth of feeling experienced welling up from within. In the end, the words of thanks, praise, adoration, and love give way to silence that says far more than the most potent man-made means of expression. All a person wants to do now is to remain silent and still in Christ and together with his gaze upon God’s glory in a form of prayer that has traditionally been called Contemplation.

In this contemplation in which the whole person — heart and mind, body and soul — is more united than ever before, a subtle change begins to take place. Initially, it was through meditating on God’s love, as embodied in the human body of Jesus, that leads a person to contemplation on Christ as he once was on earth, but now a change gradually begins to take place. Meditating on God’s love as it was embodied in the historical Christ gives way to contemplating his love as it is now, pouring out of the risen Christ. The first form of contemplation sometimes called acquired contemplation was generated with God’s grace and human endeavour.

The second, sometimes called mystical contemplation is a pure gift of God. It is the fruit of this profound prayer that is, in the eyes of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the perfect preparation for sharing the Faith with others, because in this prayer the fruits of contemplation are given to the one who prays, namely the infused virtues and gifts of the Holy Spirit. We must therefore persevere for long enough in this prayer to experience for ourselves something of the love that we are called to share with others in this sublime contemplation, sometimes in the light sometimes in darkness, or we will have little to give.

However, before the gift of contemplation can lead to the full union for which the believer now craves, a purification begins to take place so that the selfish seeker can receive the Selfless Giver without any let or hindrance. If this purification is not complete in this life it has to be completed in the next life, where it is called Purgatory. In this life, some have called it the ‘Spiritual Desert or Wilderness’, the ‘House of Self-knowledge’, the ‘Dark Night of the Soul’, or ‘Purgatory on Earth’.

David is the author of ‘How to Pray’ just published by Our Sunday Visitor

He is also a regular podcast contributor to Discerninghearts.com Please find his latest podcasts at The Hermit

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3 thoughts on “How to Love God”

  1. Mental prayer is indispensable to the life of a Christian because it is the means to grow in our love for God. Thanks to your article Sir David!

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