Humility & The Love of God
Humility is the beginning of any healthy approach to spirituality. Specifically, I mean that it is the letting go of any concepts that lead us to believe we already know and have the answer. In many ways, we are products of our post-Enlightenment culture, seeking the right answers and beliefs, elevating and clinging to what we find as a kind of security blanket that keeps us feeling both right and safe. Once we obtain what we perceive to be total truth, we often begin to use it as a measuring stick to judge those around us. Just look to the current political climate or many modern expressions of religious certainty for further expressions of this form of pride. The mystics had a very different focus for pursuing truth: the love of God. As Roberta C. Bondi writes in To Love as God Loves, “the goal of the spiritual life is to learn to love as God loves.” This kind of knowing does not come through mastering ideas, but through surrender. Later, Bondi writes, “We are changed not by getting everything right, but by being loved and learning to love.”
When we live out of a mindset that seeks to attain correct knowledge, we often miss the deeper invitation: to surrender to the love of God. When we are wrecked and undone, God actually has something to work with in the humility of our surrendered hearts because it is there, in our surrender, that we are no longer trying to manage God but finally open to being loved by Him. I am becoming more and more convinced that at the final judgment Jesus will be far more concerned with how we responded to his invitations to love and be loved than with whether we said the right words or held all the right beliefs about him. As John of the Cross famously wrote, “In the evening of life, we will be judged on love alone.”
A common thread among the mystics is the belief that all true, self-giving, and authentic love ultimately flows from God, whether we recognize it or not. God is not only the origin of this love, but the one who sustains and animates it. He is the source. He is the means. Any love we are able to express or receive is only possible because of God yet it will never fully match the depth of love that exists within the Godhead. If we are to hold any stable and grounding belief about God it is this: God is love. And because God is limitless, the human mind can never fully grasp or contain Him. We cannot master God through understanding; we come to know Him through encounter, surrender, and love. And this realization should lead us into deep humility.
We do not know nearly as much as we think we do and we do not need to. The invitation then is simple: to notice how God is loving me today, and to ask how God is inviting me to love in response.
And perhaps that is enough. Maybe all other beliefs find their proper place beneath this deeper, life-altering truth.
