God is love, and He pours out His love on all His creatures. But among all His earthly creatures, man is the best receptacle for His love. A city has a water supply. Whenever a person drinks from the tap, he is drinking from that source. Similarly, whenever a person loves another, his love is drawn from the supply of Love that is consubstantial with God. To love another, therefore, is, at the same time, to love God, however faintly. In addition, by tapping into God’s love, we experience an overflow of love for all whom God loves. Here is, in a word, what is meant by the “prodigality of love;” in loving one soul, there is the potential of loving all souls.
In his book, Man and Woman, Dietrich von Hildebrand states that “love responds to God’s image (the imago Dei) in the other, seeing him in the light of that likeness to God (simulitudo Dei).” We can love another only because God has placed lovableness in that other. Loving another is also loving God, even though one can remain unaware of that fact. But we cannot isolate our love for another from our love for God. If we follow the trail of love from whichever point we find it, it will lead back to God.
Beauty is infectious. Once we see something that is beautiful, we want to see more and more things that are beautiful. Our appetite for beautiful things is infinite. The same is with love. Love inspires more love. And this is so because God’s supply of love is unlimited. God will never run out of love. Our love for one is a prelude to our love for another.
Love has often been compared to a flame. A flame, however, can flicker and die. It must be strengthened (re-oxygenated). Likewise, we often reach a point at which our lives need a resuscitation. George Bernard Shaw has said that “Life is a flame that is always burning out, but it catches fire again every time a child is born.” We age and grow old. Our troubles seem to get in the way of love. We become downcast. Love may knock at the door, but it cannot get in. God then sends unspoiled emissaries into our arms to revive our ability to love. The American novelist John Greenleaf Whittier expressed this notion artfully: “We need love’s tender lessons taught as only weakness can; God hath his small interpreters; the child must teach the man.” When our 14th grandchild was born, I penned the following words and sent them to her parents: “Look at me. Can’t you see? I am a spark of the Divinity.”
Margaret Lee Runbeck (1905-1956) authored 16 novels and 250 short stories and articles. Her final work, in her relatively short span of life, is The Year of Love. Her books, rich in spirituality, have been translated into 14 languages. Among many of her spiritual gems is the following: “Once you’ve loved a child, you love all children. You give away your love to one, and you find that by the giving you have made yourself an inexhaustible treasury.”
Miss Runbeck understood that through loving one, you have tapped into God’s storehouse of love which is then released on others. As John Greenleaf Whittier has suggested, the child can be seen as an unblemished interpreter of love, connecting the love of others with God’s love. To love only one person is to make an idol of that person. Love inaugurates a kind of chain reaction that spreads quickly to others.
Physicists have illustrated the infinitesimally small size of the atom in a dramatic and startling way. Suppose all the atoms in a teaspoon of water could be uniformly distributed throughout all the oceans of the world. Then, if a person took a spoonful of water from any region of the oceans of the world, he would find an atom that originally belonged to the original teaspoon of water. This image correlates to how God’s love, from a single source, can be distributed to every human being that was ever created and will ever be created. God’s love is, indeed, prodigious.
Although every person is lovable, it is not always easy to sense that lovableness in a particular person. Not everyone is easy to love. Nevertheless, because something is not sensed does not mean that it is not there. We must make the effort to recognize in a particular person that he possesses lovableness because he was created by a loving God. This idea encourages us to be patient with others and try to find that divine endowment that exists within him. We can have that same problem with regard to ourselves. We can doubt that there is any aspect of God that lies within us. At that time, it is important that we be loved.
It may be the definition of a saint that he can perceive the lovableness of every person he meets. Will Rogers’ most famous one-liner is that he never met a man he did not like. A saint is a person who never met anyone he did not love. Paradoxically, Christ does not require us to like every person we meet. His mandate to love our neighbor is based on the fact that God has furnished each of us with love. Therefore, we should put that love into practice.
Photo by Nemuel Sereti on Unsplash
