In the Anglican Church where I spent countless Sunday mornings as a child hung a tapestry embroidered with the words ‘God Is Love’. This little phrase, so often evoked by the minister, made no sense to me and I puzzled over it for years. It’s fair to say that it was only one of many things said in church that I found unfathomable.
About twenty years later, a Christmas card arrived in my mailbox from a former boss who signed it, ‘Love, David’. I had never thought of him as anything more than a good friend and his use of the word ‘love’ took me aback. This was a term reserved for family members or people with whom one had long-lasting, deep relationships, and I had been taught that casual use diluted its meaning and impact. While I pondered the significance of David’s ‘love’, that old phrase—the one I had never managed to figure out—suddenly came back to me, and for some reason I turned it around. It became ‘Love Is God’, and then everything fell into place.
A long time ago someone must have decided that people needed to have something concrete to direct their spiritual efforts to—a ‘being’, as it were. Love, which represented the very best about humans, became personified as God. So, in my ‘aha’ moment, I decided that the phrase ‘God Is Love’ meant, well, ‘Actually, God Is Really Love’.
God is, as I have understood since then, the connection between us all when we care for each other, but it is not limited to the committed, long-term love we feel for a child, a friend, a parent, or a lover. Love, or God, also exists wherever there is understanding and complicity, in the kindness of a helpful gesture and in our humaneness when we give of ourselves to others.
My previous definition of love had been narrow and exclusive, but I began to realize that there were all kinds of other circumstances in which love flourished, however briefly. When we recognize need in the hesitation of an old person and offer a hand, when we respond with compassion to a victim of tragedy, when we delight in a momentary, meaningful exchange with a stranger, this is also love.
And it is the manifestation of God, because...God. Is. Love.
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