#richardclements

5. Red Blood Cell or Glob of Plaque? For most of us, the mission of love that God has in mind isn’t some dramatic, world-changing mission, something that will have a huge impact on the world as a whole or draw a lot of attention to us. Instead, most of us are called to local missions of love. There’s a saying that goes something like “Strive to make your little corner of the world a better place.” It’s a good saying. If we all did that, the whole world would be a much better place. The absolutely best way to make your “little corner” of the world a better place is to spread some of the divine love to that little corner. Start at home. How can you be more loving to your spouse? How can you be more loving to your children? Then extend yourself further: how could you be more loving to your friends? Your neighbors? Your co-workers? The people you perceive to be your “enemies”? We all have a choice in life: we can be red blood cells flowing within the Body of Christ, helping to carry life-giving oxygen (the divine love) to other members and prospective members of that Body, or we can choose to be globs of plaque, clogging the arteries of that Body and obstructing the flow of divine love. Most of us are a little bit of both. Resolve to be more of a red blood cell and less of a glob of plaque.

4. Mission: Implausible But God did not intend for us to be merely passive members of the Body of Christ. God has entrusted to each of us a unique role, a unique mission of love, within the Body of Christ. That may seem hard to believe at first: God has given me a special mission of love to carry out in life? But it’s true. Each of us is given the great privilege, and the solemn responsibility, of helping to pass on the divine love to other members (and prospective members) of the Body of Christ. Which includes everyone, because God wants everyone to share in his divine life and love forever (Matt 18:14; 1 Tim 2:4). You have been given a unique mission to share the divine love with others. The unique meaning and purpose of your life lies in your mission of love. Your mission is irreplaceable. No one else can fulfill your mission for you. No one else’s life will touch the exact combination of people that your life will touch. No one else can add to the eternal circulation of love the contribution that you were born to make. What is the mission of love with which God has entrusted you?

2. The Eternal Circulation of Love The divine life of God is an eternal circulation of love among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You and I and every other human being who has ever existed were created to share forever in that eternal flow of love. You and I and every other human being were meant to be united forever with God and with all of our fellow human beings who choose to accept God’s offer of a share in the divine life. Only there, only within that eternal circulation of love, will our hearts find the happiness, freedom, purpose, and peace that they so desperately desire. But to be able to share as fully as possible in the divine life and love, we have to learn how to love as God loves. At the heart of the divine love, at the heart of the divine life, lies the gift of self. The essence of love is the gift of self, because the essence of Love is the gift of self. God is self-gift. Giving is not just something that God does; giving is what God is. The divine life of God is an eternal exchange of the gift of self among God the Father, God the Son (Jesus Christ), and God the Holy Spirit. From all eternity, God the Father pours out the gift of himself in begetting God the Son. The Father selflessly shares his total divinity with the Son, giving the Son everything he is except his status as Father, his status as the “unoriginate Origin”[i], which he cannot give away. The Son eternally receives the Father’s gift of self in love and gratitude, selflessly giving the Father the gift of himself in return. This reciprocal self-gift of Father and Son is so perfect, so complete, that it “spirates” a third divine Person, the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of love flowing between Father and Son. The Holy Spirit joins with the Father and the Son in the eternal exchange of the gift of self that constitutes the divine life. In God, we see the true nature of love revealed: Love is the selfless gift of self, given and received. The divine bliss consists precisely in this eternal circulation of love among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.[ii] We were born to share forever in the eternal circulation of love that is the divine life. But to participate as fully as possible in the divine life, we have to learn to selflessly give and receive the gift of self in love. That’s what we’re here to learn how to do. And the more fully we learn to do that, the more fully we can share in the divine love and life and bliss. [i] Balthasar, Explorations in Theology. Vol. 5, Man Is Created, 172. [ii] I am indebted to the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar for many of these ideas.

We’re all here to learn how to love. Life is a school of love. The things that happen to you in life are meant to help you learn how to love. The people who cross your path in life are meant to help you learn how to love, and you’re meant to help them learn how to love, too. We’re all on a journey back to God, a journey ad Deum. It’s just that some of us don’t realize that yet, or have forgotten it, or else don’t want to believe it. But we are. We all came from God, and we’re all intended to return to God. Only in God will we find the ultimate happiness, freedom, purpose, and peace that we so desperately desire. The little three-word phrase “God is love” (1 John 4:16) is the most profound statement ever uttered by a human being. For some people, however, the phrase “God is love” has become so familiar as to have become almost trite. They may acknowledge that it is true in the abstract, but it is not a truth that they allow to impact their daily lives in any significant way: “‘God is love’ sounds nice, but it doesn’t pay the bills” – this seems to be the attitude of some people. Other people reject the claim that “God is love” entirely. Many of us need to consider (or reconsider) the profound meaning and implications of the claim that “God is love”. This little phrase not only claims that God exists; it also makes a startling claim about what God is. The claim is not just that God has love, but rather that God is love. Love is what God is. God’s essence, the core of who and what God is, is love. Not thought, or power, or freedom, or knowledge, or any of the other things that we human beings might have expected or predicted to be the essence of God, but love. But “God is love” is not just a statement about God. It’s also a statement about the nature of existence, the nature of life itself. God is not just one more being among many. God is not some “super-being” with superhuman powers. Some atheists seem to derive pleasure from attacking such images of God, but that’s not the God in whom we Christians believe. No, God is not just one more being among many; God is Being itself (Exodus 3:14; John 8:58). God is the Mind behind all that exists, the Mind that gave rise to all that exists and that sustains everything in existence from moment to moment, the Source and Ground of all that exists, the uncaused Cause of all that exists. So if God is Being itself, and the essence of God is love, then the essence of Being itself is love. Love is what Being is, so love is what being is meant to be. To love is to be, and to love more fully is to be more fully. The more fully we join in the dynamic of love, the more fully we share in Being, and the more fully alive we are. Some of the ancients described human life as a process of exitus and reditus: a going out from God when we are born into this life so that we might then freely choose whether or not we want to return to God forever. Our life is intended to be a journey back to God, a journey back to Love. We were born for love. We were made from and for love. We were created to dwell forever in the divine Love, but whether we end up there or not depends on whether we accept God’s offer of a share in the divine life. Life is a beautiful and profound and mysterious drama in which our ultimate destiny, our eternal destiny, hinges on our choice of whether to say Yes or No to Love and to love. The stakes couldn’t be higher. So why does God leave the choice up to us? Again, it’s because love, to be genuine, has to be both freely offered and freely accepted. God doesn’t work by force, but rather by persuasion. God freely offers us the gift of a share in the divine life and love, but it’s up to each of us to choose whether to accept the gift or not. We’re all enrolled in the school of love, but it’s up to each of us whether we make the most of the opportunity or choose to drop out.

Introduction It’s All about Love “Love is everything….” Saint Thérèse of Lisieux “Love is the whole and more than all” E. E. Cummings Why did I write The Book of Love? Well, the most important reason was so that whenever I hear the pop song “(Who Wrote) The Book of Love?”[i], I could say, “I did!” Oh yeah, there were a couple of other reasons too: something about love being the ultimate reality, and something about our ultimate destiny hinging on our choice of whether to say Yes or No to love…. But seriously: it turns out that love is what life is all about. Love is the answer to the big questions in life that we all wonder about sooner or later: Ø Why is there something rather than nothing? For the sake of love Ø Why are we all here? To share forever in the divine life of God, which is an eternal circulation of love Ø Why am I, in particular, here? To carry out a mission of love that is unique to me and share forever in the eternal circulation of love Ø Is there any ultimate meaning or purpose to life? Yes, and they are found in love Ø How can we attain ultimate happiness? Through love Ø How can we attain ultimate freedom? Through love Ø How can we attain ultimate peace? Through love Yes, it turns out that life is all about love. Not wealth, not pleasure, not status, not power, not knowledge, but love. All of those other things can be good, even very good. But they’re not the ultimate good. Life is a school of love. We’re all here to learn how to love. We all have our origin in Love, and our intended destination is Love. We are all homo viator: people on the way; travelers; wayfarers; voyagers; adventurers. The problem is, many of us have forgotten what our destination is, or even that we have a destination at all.[ii] We are all on a journey ad Amorem, a journey to Love. Whether we arrive there or not and the condition in which we arrive depend on the extent to which we open or close our hearts and minds to love. The real Book of Love was written by “someone from above”. There is an “absolute being” (i.e., God), and the essence of that absolute being is love. God did not need the world in order to be God, nor did God need the world in order to be love, but God, purely out of divine love and freedom, chose to create the entire cosmos so that all of creation (including us human beings) could share in the divine life and love of God. In Jesus Christ, God reveals to us that his essence, and therefore the essence of being itself, the essence of life itself, is self-giving love. To give oneself away in self-sacrificial love is to be truly alive. The divine life consists precisely in an eternal circulation of self-giving love among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We were created to share forever in that dynamic flow of love. We were created to dwell eternally in the divine life and love of God, and to pass that life and love on to others. That’s why we’re here. As Hans Urs von Balthasar, the brilliant Roman Catholic theologian from Switzerland, so aptly expressed it, “The meaning of the world is love.”[iii] However, because love is genuine only if it is freely given and freely received, God gives us the freedom to choose whether to open our hearts and minds to love. Life is a grand drama in which our ultimate destiny, as well as the fulfillment of our deepest desires, hinges on our decision of whether to say Yes or No to love. We can choose to remain imprisoned within the cramped confines of our self-centered, self-enclosed egos, or we can break out of our finitude and into the “immeasurable spaces of freedom”[iv], into the divine life of God, which is an eternal circulation of love. [i] Originally recorded by The Monotones. Music and lyrics by Warren Davis, George Malone, and Charles Patrick. [ii] Pearce, Literature: What Every Catholic Should Know, 1. [iii] Balthasar, Heart of the World, 203. [iv] Ibid., 144.