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Seized by the power of a great affection
By Julie Bender
timbrel, January-February 2004
I’ve come to believe that love is the hardest thing to receive. And I’m not talking about the unhealthy versions of smother love, self-seeking love, jealous love, co-dependent love, etc. This is about truly healthy, unconditional, self-giving love that desires the highest good of the other—the Ultimate Love that is at the heart of the universe.
It seems impossible that such love would be hard to accept, yet so it appears. I remember the story of Susan from Sierra Leone, placed in an orphanage at age 2 when her mother died. When war came she was airlifted out of the country and eventually adopted at age 5 by Sylvie and John. It took months before she would sit on Sylvie’s lap. In her short life she associated a woman with someone who cared for her and then would leave her.
God seemed to know how hard it would be for humankind to trust that Ultimate Love was behind the creation of the world. So God went to great lengths to demonstrate the nature of his Ultimate Pursuing Love.
First he selected a chosen people, the Israelites. This way God could model to the world what his Parent-heart of Love was like. God promised to bless them and to use them to bless the whole world. God promised to lead them to Canaan, where God would lavish care on them.
But then came the wilderness: God’s preparation time, a time when God modeled a loving wise parent who wanted to teach the Israelites, no matter how many times they failed him. But all that hardship and suffering must have seemed so unreasonable. Seemingly so inconsistent with Love. And pretty far removed from any so-called Promised Land, which after all sounded too good to be true.
Through Jesus, today we as the church are God’s new chosen people. But it is interesting to me that the New Testament image for the church is not so often children. Instead, God usually refers to the church as a chosen bride, the bride of Christ. So now instead of picturing God as the ever patient, unconditionally loving Parent, we are invited to view God as the persistent Suitor, Romancing us to win our love.
We as Christians become God’s example to the world of a different way to live, because we know that we are in a Sacred Romance. We believe in a God who gives us freedom to choose—a God who doesn’t want puppets—but pursues us with love and wins our heart, commanding our allegiance.
Yet in many ways we are not so different from the Israelites or the general population. Oh yes, we espouse faith and love in God, but we guard our hearts tightly. We too have our questions about God’s love and how far to trust it. We too wander in the wilderness; we complain and see enough heartache and suffering to seriously question whether a larger story of a Sacred Romance exists.
There is this wildness about God that we don’t understand. We too doubt that God is truly loving, that God desires our highest good. After all, there is a lot about life that we don’t understand and that seems downright unjust in our world, for those of us who value safety, security, health, and plenty. Why doesn’t this all powerful god set things right instead of allowing so much freedom—including choices for evil and violence? It feels like we are left alone in a cold, indifferent world.
God’s story for my life seems too complex and risky. Maybe I had better just take control of life, kill the passions of the heart, and live life safely and securely by observing high morals and ideals, engaging in “sanctified busyness.”
Sometimes we try to construct a businesslike partnership with God in which we have promises and rewards, a contract that will obligate God to grant us exemption from life’s dangers. Whether it is seeking a certain spiritual experience, believing correct doctrine, or living right, the desire is the same: taming God in order to tame life.
Never mind those deep yearnings of the soul, never mind the nagging awareness that God is not cooperating. If the system isn’t working, it must be because we’re not doing it right. There’s always something to work on, with the promise of abundant life just around the corner. Surely if we faithfully walk the Christian path, God will reward us.
But God can’t be tamed according to any structured businesslike contract. There’s a wildness about this Lavish, Ultimate Love, as demonstrated by Jesus on the cross. There we meet our Pursuing God, who So Loved the World, romancing us again—one more attempt to break through the barriers around our heart, to win us over to Ultimate Love and to be healed, saved from the viruses of control and self-sufficiency.
In the U.S. South when someone became converted it was said that the person “was seized by the power of a great affection.” This seemed the most fitting way to describe the experience, when a heart responds to God’s initiative of Love—when Jesus becomes real, alive, and Lord of one’s life.
I like this phrase, because it speaks more to a heartfelt response than head knowledge alone. It creates the image of someone being won over to an irresistible love that motivates one to respond with a certain irrational abandon. It invites us to let down our barriers, to trust, to become vulnerable, to risk our hearts, maybe to risk everything, in a way that a head knowledge doesn’t.
But still, can we trust desire and sacred longings within Christianity? What might our spiritual life might look like were we to respond to the Sacred Romance and become seized by the power of great affection?
First, I believe we will respond to God out of love, not fear. The Bible teaches that perfect love casts out fear, and that fear has to do with expecting punishment. It’s like the woman who quits smoking because she loves her husband and cares for his health and hers, not because she’s afraid of his anger if she lights up. Likewise, love for God commands our obedience, but there’s a vast difference when our motivation to obey springs from love versus fear.
Moreover, responding to the Sacred Romance and being seized by the power of great affection will enable us to live beyond only following the rules, but rather to engage life as a joyous celebration. When we encounter the Ultimate Love at the heart of the universe we find ourselves not so much on a drudging march to Zion, but in a dance of intimacy. It’s a dance evolving out of prayerful presence with the God who pursues us, in love.
Let your faith become a heart response! Become vulnerable, trust, risk!
“Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all!”*
* From “When I survey the wondrous cross.” Article was inspired by The Sacred Romance by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge (Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1997). For reprint permission, contact the editor. |