Father Richard identifies our ability to love as the very foundation of our being:
The most powerful, most needed, and most essential teaching is always about love. Love is our foundation and our destiny. It is where we come from and where we’re headed. As Saint Paul famously says, “So faith, hope, and love remain, but the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13).
My hope, whenever I speak or write, is to help clear away the impediments to receiving, allowing, trusting, and participating in a foundational Love. God’s love is planted inside each of us as the Holy Spirit who, according to Jesus, “will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you” (John 14:26). Love is who we are!
All I can do is remind you of what you already know deep within your true self and invite you to live connected to this Source. John the Evangelist writes, “God is love, and whoever remains in love, remains in God and God in him or her” (1 John 4:16). The biblical creation story says that we were created in the very “image and likeness” of God, who is love (Genesis 1:26; see also Genesis 9:6). Out of the Trinity’s generative, loving relationship, creation takes form, mirroring its Creator.
We have heard this phrase so often that we don’t understand the existential shock of what “created in the image and likeness of God” means for us. If this is true—and I believe it is—our family of origin is divine. It is saying that we were created by a loving God to be love in the world. Our core is original blessing, not original sin. Our starting point is positive and, as is written in the first chapter of the Bible, it is “very good” (Genesis 1:31). We do have a good place to return home to. If the beginning is right, the rest becomes considerably easier, because we can know and trust the clear direction of our life’s trajectory.
We must all overcome the illusion of separateness. It is the primary task of religion to communicate not worthiness but union, to reconnect people to their original identity “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). The Bible calls the state of separateness “sin.” God’s job description is to draw us back into primal and intimate relationship. “My dear people, we are already children of God; what we will be in the future has not yet been fully revealed, and all I do know is that we shall be like God” (1 John 3:2). [1]
Love is who we are. When we don’t live according to love, we are outside of being. We’re not being real. When we love, we are acting according to our deepest being, our deepest truth. We are operating according to our dignity. [2]
References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love, selected by Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Orbis Books, 2018), 12–13.
[2] Rohr, Essential Teachings, v.
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