For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God – Romans 8:14
According to Thomas Merton1 (1915-1968), humanity’s purpose in life is to discover meaning and live according to it. We’re each wrestling with the dissonance between what our lives project, and what our inner longings tell us are true.
“The first responsibility of a person of faith is to make their faith really a part of their life, not by rationalizing it but by living it” (1978, XIV). This living into our faith, materializing it in the world, is a participatory experience within God’s own Trinitarian Personhood. The Father, Son, and Spirit united perfectly in holy, divesting love, have created us for fellowship. In this way, says Merton, “We do not exist for ourselves alone”… and by understanding this reality, we can love ourselves and others properly.
Love, as a grand theme, is the key to resolving our inner conflicts. To experience God’s inner realities of perfect acceptance and affirmation invites us into God’s reality, a reality that supersedes the present. “Infinite sharing is the law of god’s inner life,” he says. But he challenges our concepts of love by insisting that the giving of God’s kind of love, is where true liberty and humanity’s contentment are found.
“Happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy…. true happiness is found in unselfish love, a love which increases as it’s shared.“
In sharing in God’s love, we ultimately satisfy our deepest longings. Many of us love for the results of love, the effects of love that reverberate back to us. This, according to Merton, is a kind of “hidden moral tyranny” and an ultimately self-centered act. This sort of charity for the sake of the giver is far from God’s love. It may look like we’ve performed a loving act, and even be characterized as a loving person, but if we are seeking the effects of the love we’ve given rather than simply expressing the beauty of love from which we have been loved, according to Merton, we’ve failed to participate in God’s inner life.
“In disinterested activity, we best fulfill our capacities to act and be.”
To be disinterested is to have no alternative motives for loving rather than the beautiful expression of love itself. This is the love that God has experienced from all of eternity within His own Personhood and conveyed on Calvary two millennia ago.
God’s love is intended to awaken the recipient’s capacity to think and be. Sometimes people don’t receive God’s love, and therefore can’t truly receive ours. If the reaction toward God’s love isn’t met with an open reception to God’s love, that doesn’t mean the love was a waste, but that the reciprocating nature of God’s inner loving life has been stopped short of its intended purpose.
We love because God has first loved us in Christ, through the Spirit. As we experience this eternal, enduring, and present reality, we, by faith move out into the world of our neighbor and enter the suffering love of God. A love that is often rejected, but doesn’t give up. A love that knocks on the dormant, cold heart of humanity and smiles with an invitation to gather ’round the warm hearth of fellowship. If accepted, if received, the invited are forever changed and begin sharing in the love of God, through the Spirit.
In this way, love is perfected, and the world is healed, one heart, one soul at a time. We are filled with God’s Spirit to participate in God’s love and inner Life.
- Thomas Merton was a French-born monk, author, and poet who wrote more than 50 books. His reflective, mystical, and contemplative style speaks to a generation absorbed in the constructs of enlightenment positivism, devoid of the eternal, and longing for a purpose beyond this life. ↩︎