The Irreverent Reverend

Richard Rohr writes, “You see, only love can move across boundaries and across cultures. Love is a very real energy, a spiritual life force that is much more powerful than ideas or mere thoughts. Love is endlessly alive, always flowing toward the lower place, and thus life giving for all, like the great river and water itself.”

All of the energy of Advent points us toward love. The second coming (the coming of the Christ consciousness into the world), and the incarnation (God inhabiting the human heart) both point to a greater love than we can ever manage on our own. As Frederick Buechner notes, “We have a hard time loving the people we are supposed to love.” When the Christ consciousness inhabits our lives more fully, we embody a greater love. We become the vessel through which the Christ consciousness flows. Like water from an eternal source, it flows into us from God and through us into others and into the world in a never ending rhythm of love and life.

In this way Christ is always coming into the world, not as a baby but as a real life-giving energy. In this way love is always coming into the world, as we embody the love that becomes incarnate in us.

Most of our images of love are romantic with hearts and cupids and little arrows jabbing us when we least expect it. And while true, love is often inconvenient, what we are pointed to in this season is not romantic love but agape love.

Agape love is the term used to define God’s immeasurable incomparable love for human kind. It is God’s ongoing, outgoing, concern for all people. God gives this love without condition, unreservedly for all. Most of the time we want to filter agape love through our own screens of who is worthy and who is not. Agape love has no filtering screens.

Agape is the “highest” form of love. It is love given without expectation of anything in return. It is love given unconditionally to those we know and those we don’t know. It is the root of compassion and generosity. It is what we embody when we give from the deepest part of our being, not out of duty or obligation, but freely and with a grateful heart. The growth of agape love in the human heart makes every deed and action an act of gratitude and an expression of devotion.

This kind of love is transformational in our lives. It takes us a lifetime to get the hang of it because it is so counter to all our cultural definitions of love. As with every part of a growing faith, the focus is not on the destination, but on the journey.