When I want to say “I love you,” I often give a gift. Why? Saying “I love you” seems like what everyone says, what I have said before now, and not big enough for the feelings I have inside me.
How do I get the experience out of me using words? Even a tiny experience makes this hard: my shoulder hurts. That is true right now, but the grinding, dull ache is hard to convey with the weakness that comes along aside. Even the doctor will ask me to put the pain on a scale, but I suspect that my scale does not convey much information. My wife birthed five children and that was painful, a ten, I would guess, but I am just guessing. What is my pain relative to that pain?
Is it a four? Or by persistence over days is it a five?
How do I communicate? The bigger the experience, the harder the words are to find. Jesus is real. How do I convey that real encounter? Some would say I cannot, because it is inside me and only inside me. They can not replicate the experience as they can with external objects, such as the leaf blower making a racket outside my office. After all, my friends can hear the leaf blower as well, but here is the problem: I am not concerned if they miss just how irritating a leaf blower is to me, the differences between us don’t count, but I do, desperately wish, to convey deeper or higher things.
When people tell me that love and lust are similar, I think: “This is not true for me. What is it I am feeling, so different than the lustful desire, that these people are not getting?” When anyone who has seen God and experienced even a bit of the wonder of God, then reading that some atheist thinks the “wonder of the cosmos” can substitute for God inspired wonder is bizarre. The cosmos is full of wonder, deep, beautiful, glorious, wonder, but it is different and less than the Divine Wonder.
Yet here too words are failing me. I feel better when Dante, who created a language and commanded his tongue as well as any man who ever lived says of seeing God:
But oh how much my words miss my conception, which is itself so far from what I saw that to call it feeble would be rank deception!*
His words about God and love are so good, but I can see that even Dante knew, perhaps for the first time in his life, that his world class talent was not enough. If this master failed, what am I to do?
There is one hope:
Dante describes God as full of love, love that keeps going, one person of the Trinity giving love, the other receiving, and then this other person giving love Himself. Love forms a self-sustaining cycle of love that cannot be stopped, because it finds its end and source of motion within itself.
This love is unchanging, perfect, eternal. We are not so, but we can, in the person of Jesus, experience God’s love. We all do experience it differently. In fact, I can experience God’s love as His wrath, if I choose to become hateful myself and so warp my sense of who God is and what God is doing. Still, though the love is the same and as humans created in His Image, we can (if we wash) keep getting washed by this continuous love.
The universal, unchanging, sustaining love of God is so much grander than our words or even our ability to twist the experience that in the end every knee will bow. We will get it sooner or later, God help me to get it sooner, because God’s love, the Divine experience is irresistible. . . God comes, we see, He conquers.
That experience can only be mentioned, but anyone who has had it will understand. Yes! Correct! Ah! Right!
We will need only point at the Beloved God and our experience of Him for other lovers to get what we are feeling. Our words will fail, but Love communicates clearly, the Love that moves the Heavens and the stars.
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*Dante Alighieri (2001-08-01). The Paradiso (The Divine Comedy) . Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.
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