God’s love is perfect and unconditional

‘God is love and the one who lives in love, lives in God and God lives in him” (1 John 4:16). February has become known as the month of love because of the celebration of Valentine’s Day on the 14th.

The feast day of St Valentine was first associated with romantic love in the High Middle Ages, when the tradition of courtly love flourished. It evolved into an occasion on which lovers expressed their love for each other by presenting flowers, offering confectionary, and sending greeting cards (known as “valentines”).

Today we celebrate Valentine’s Day with symbols such has hearts, roses and chocolates. And it is a crazy day in the market; shops are full of red and white paraphernalia that are highly sought after and sometimes extortionately overpriced.

On Valentine’s Day, I am sure, you have seen children going off to school in red and white clothes, carrying flowers for their teachers. Some adults, too, decide to dress up for work in Valentine’s colours, and some organisations and parishes, including mine, organise Valentine’s Balls to raise funds.

Why is society making such a big deal about love at this time?

In some way it is an attempt to express the fact that we love. But that is only partly so. In our highly sexualised society we more commonly focus on expressing romantic and physical love. And we confuse love and sex. We talk about “making love” as if it invariably is love.

It is easy to express the romantic and physical aspect of love, but more often this is associated only with warm and fuzzy feelings, not the real experience of love.

And we express this aspect of love only to those whom we love. This is where our inadequacy to love is exposed — our inability to know what love is and our belief that love is for us to give to some people and to withhold from others.

Consider John again: “God

is love and the one who lives in love, lives in God and God lives in him.”

We struggle to understand what this means. If we know God, we will know love. We struggle to know God, and therefore we do not know love—we are longing to know Love, we are longing to experience Love, we are longing for unconditional acceptance and affection and to experience the deep embrace of someone saying to us: “You are wonderful, you are perfect, you are beautiful, you are mine and I love you.”

Rumi, a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, theologian and Sufi mystic, tells us that love is not something that you have or don’t have.

“A life without love is a waste. ‘Should I look for spiritual love, or material, or physical love?’ — don’t ask yourself this question. Discrimination leads to discrimination. Love doesn’t need any name, category or definition. Love is a world itself. Either you are in, at the centre…or you are out, yearning.”

God’s unconditional love is not always easy to understand and yet we are commanded “that you love one another as I have loved you” (Jn 15:12).

How can one love with no conditions? There are so many people who hurt us, betray us, disrespect us. How do we love them?

The Jesuit writer Fr Anthony De Mello uses the following analogies to explain what love is.

Take a look at a rose. Is it possible for a rose to say, “I shall offer my fragrance to good people and withhold it from bad people”? Or imagine a lamp that withholds its rays from a wicked person who seeks to walk in its light? And observe how helplessly and indiscriminately a tree gives its shade to everyone, good and bad, young and old, high and low; to animals and humans and every living creature, even to the one who seeks to cut it down.

The rose, the lamp and the tree illustrate that love is not something we have, but it is what we are. God does not have love. God is love.

God loves us no matter what we do. God’s love, as Jesus assures us, is always both unmerited and unconditional, nothing we do can ever make God love us, just as nothing we do can ever stop God from loving us. God loves just as God does everything else, perfectly. God loves everything and everybody perfectly.

God just loves us, pure and simple. God cannot be offended. God’s love cannot be driven away. God does not reward or punish us on the basis of whether we have been good or bad. God simply loves us.

One more time, let us reflect on John’s quote which started this article: “God is love and the one who lives in love, lives in God and God lives in him.”