Book Review: The Divine Heart: Seven Ways to Live in God’s Love

The Divine Heart: Seven Ways to Live in God’s Love

Many of us have spent the last year or so struggling to keep going. We have been learning to live in ways which include keeping our social distance, wearing masks, and connecting with people virtually. Many of us have felt disoriented and sad. We seem to have lost our understanding of how to live in God’s love or connect to God’s divine heart.

In The Divine Heart, Colette Lafia describes seven ways we can discover how to live again in God’s love. She draws questions and insights from her own experiences and reflection. Colette shares lessons from everyday moments like seeing a seagull, riding a city bus, and sitting on her bed. These moments unfurl like the petals of a rose to reveal our loving relationship to God. She encourages us to begin keeping a spiritual journal.

Each of the seven ways is an invitation to us to explore and discover and learn to love.

The Divine Heart: Receptivity

We are more comfortable giving than receiving. Many of us have been taught to give since we very young. Giving helps us feel we are making a contribution, making a practical difference in situations.

It is more challenging for us to receive, particularly from God’s love for us.

As we begin to explore living in the love of God’s divine heart, most of us need to learn how to receive. How do we let God love us more so our relationship can deepen? Are there ways we can practice growing into receptivity?

One practice which can help us become more receptive is active listening. We learn to listen by practicing being open to the truths within us and all around us. As we become more receptive we can listen more clearer.

The Divine Heart: Delight

Colette writes, “When we delight in something, we’re filled with wonder and allow each moment to embrace us with endless possibilities. We taste life’s gifts and savor our newfound joy.”

It may be a challenge for us to understand how delight can be part of living into the love of God’s divine heart. Some of us feel we have more experience with the analytical, intellectual aspects of spiritual life. We have difficulty believing God delights in us, or we might delight in spiritual life.

Colette’s book draws us into discovering the delightful aspects of spiritual life.

The Divine Heart: Expansiveness

We have become accustomed to living lives filled with limitations. Many of us are tired and frustrated by facing limitations, particularly during this past year of the pandemic. Month after month we have run into the limitations of fear and loss and the ways we are protecting ourselves.

God’s divine heart reminds us we are able to love and receive love beyond the limitations we impose on ourselves.

Our hearts and our minds are not nearly as limited as we believe they are. As we open them to spiritual life we begin to appreciate our remarkable potential.

The Divine Heart: Acceptance

Many of us have a difficult time accepting ourselves. We struggle with how we see ourselves and wish we were different.

As we learn to live in God’s love in new ways, the divine heart opens us to how God accepts us more deeply than we accept ourselves.

Each of us is on a journey of discovery and acceptance. Colette suggests practices which can help us grow in accepting ourselves and other people.

Living in God’s love is filled with lessons in embracing ourselves. God’s love is about who we actually are, not who we wish we were.

The Divine Heart: Vulnerability

Before we are even able to think about it, we believe we need to protect ourselves from the world. Our defensive systems are more complicated because we are not aware of all their twists and turns.

Growing into wisdom is, in large part, learning how to be vulnerable. As we live we experience challenges and loss. We learn we cannot protect ourselves from everything and everyone. Wisdom shows us how we can be vulnerable to ourselves, to God, and to others.

Can living in God’s love show us how to take risks and practice vulnerability?

The Divine Heart: Mystery

For me, the interplay of receptivity, delight, expansiveness, acceptance, and vulnerability opens me to mystery.

I cannot explain how all the strands of spiritual life come together and come to life. A significant part of my spiritual journey is beyond understanding, the product of mystery.

Love is a mystery, whether it is our love for each other or for ourselves, or how we live in God’s love. We cannot explain the ways God loves us and gives us life. The ways we love God are a mystery to us.

The Divine Heart: Gratitude

Living in God’s love creates a response of gratitude in us. We each express our gratitude in our own unique ways.

Colette describes several ways to develop a practice of gratitude in her seventh invitation. She writes about how gratitude is a result of receiving life and love as gifts, and it needs a foundation of rest.

It is difficult for us to become grateful when we believe we have earned the love or life we have. We need to take time to rest, to close our eyes and listen. Contemplation allows us to pause long enough to find gratitude.

The Divine Heart

Each of us is searching for the love we need. Colette Lafia’s book The Divine Heart is an engaging, vulnerable place to either begin or continue living in God’s love.

Colette’s insights and questions help us recognize and experience God’s love in new ways. We find the divine heart open to us in ways we have not experienced it before, or are reminded of what we have forgotten.

She invites us to practice exploring God’s love and the divine heart.

How will we take time to practice receptivity today?

Where will we recognize the delight of our hearts this week?

[Image by Colette Lafia]

Greg Richardson is a spiritual director in Southern California. He is a recovering assistant district attorney and associate university professor, and is a lay Oblate with New Camaldoli Hermitage near Big Sur, California. Greg’s website is StrategicMonk.com and his email address is [email protected].