Unconditional Love
It is sad to say, but the familiar phrase “the unconditional love of God” has become cliche, a true but trite expression devoid of any real meaning. Words, like anything else used too often, soon depreciate in value, lose their edge, and cease to bite into our lives. When phrases, such as unconditional love, trip too easily off the tongue, the speaker’s ego may experience a temporary rush of exhilaration using an in salvation slogan, but his heart remains unchanged.
How do I know this? Well, I have long been smitten with concepts. They engage my mind, rustle my thought process, and stir my emotions. Unconditional love as a concept has transported me to intellectual nirvana, motivated the reading of at least fifty books on related themes, and deluded me into believing that I was there. Until along came a day when I was appalled to discover that nothing had changed. It was all a head trip. Lofty thoughts and impersonal concepts left my lousy self-image intact and my way of praying unchanged.
Until the love of God that knows no boundary, limit, or breaking point is internalized through personal decision; until the furious longing of God seizes the imagination; until the heart is conjoined to the mind through sheer grace, nothing happens. The idolatry of ideas has left me puffed up, narrow-minded, and intolerant of any idea that does not coincide with mine.
The wild, unrestricted love of God is not simply an inspiring idea. When it imposes itself on mind and heart with the stark reality of ontological truth, it determines why and at what time you get up in the morning, how you pass your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, and who you hang with; it affects what breaks your heart, what amazes you, and what makes your heart happy.
The revolutionary thinking that God loves me as I am and not me as I should be requires radical rethinking and profound emotional adjustment. Small wonder that the late spiritual giant Basil Hume of London, England, claimed that Christians find it easier to believe that God exists than that God loves them.
In his magnificent book God First Loved Us, Antony Campbell remarks: Originally, I believed the acceptance of a loving God involved a sufficient but relatively minor shift of attitude. After all, it was on so many people’s lips. The more I worked with it, the more I realized that the acceptance in faith of God’s unconditional love was not only hugely significant, it required a major change of attitude … the major shift may be the images we have of God and ourselves. How radically is our image of God reshaped if we take seriously the belief in God as deeply, passionately, and unconditionally loving us? How radically must we rework our own self-image if we accept ourselves as lovable — as deeply, passionately, and unconditionally loved by God?
Two important corollaries flow from this life-changing revolution. First, if we continue to picture God as a small-minded bookkeeper, a niggling customs officer rifling through our moral suitcase, as a policeman with a club who is going to bat us over the head every time we stumble and fall, or as a whimsical, capricious, and cantankerous thief who delights in raining on our parade and stealing our joy, we flatly deny what John writes in his first letter (1 John 4:16) — “God is love.” In human beings, love is a quality, a high-prized virtue; in God, love is his identity.
Secondly, if we continue to view ourselves as moral lepers and spiritual failures, if our lives are shadowed by low self-esteem, shame, remorse, unhealthy guilt, and self-hatred, we reject the teaching of Jesus and cling to our negative self-image.
In the fifth century, St. Augustine wrote this lyrical line: “In loving me, you made me lovable.”
Brennan Manning, from The Furious Longing of God