"I heard a voice speaking to me: ‘The young woman whom you see is Love. She has her tent in eternity…It was love which was the source of this creation in the beginning when God said: ‘Let it be! And it was. As though in the blinking of an eye, the whole creation was formed through love. The young woman is radiant in such a clear, lightning-like brilliance of countenance that you can’t fully look at her… She holds the sun and moon in her right hand and embraces them tenderly… The whole of creation calls this maiden ‘Lady.’ For it was from her that all of creation proceeded, since Love was the first. She made everything… Love was in eternity and brought forth, in the beginning of all holiness, all creatures without any admixture of evil. Adam and Eve, as well were produced by love from the pure nature of the Earth."
A Vision of Creation, from the letters of St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098 - 1179)
“One of them, a lawyer, asked him [Jesus] a question, to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” And he said to them, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”” Matthew 22: 35 – 40
Jesus links the two commandments given in Deuteronomy 6:5 (You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might) and Leviticus 19:18 (Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbour as yourself), and says that they are alike – loving God, loving yourself and loving your neighbour.
This is the great Truth that the mystics awaken to – there is no separation. There is no separation between God and ourselves. There is no separation between the self and others. The three loves are one love. “The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw God in all things and all things in God,” said Mechthild of Magdeburg.
"These three loves are engendered by one another, nourished by one another, and fanned into flame by one another. Then they are all brought to perfection together." From The Mirror of Charity by Aelred of Rievaulx (1110 – 1167)
Aelred of Rievaulx expands on Jesus' words in the Gospel of Matthew, and describes how the three loves are intertwined, flowing from and to each other, ultimately becoming one love, which is love of God in everyone.
There are many different types of love. While there is an element of eros, of passionate, romantic love, in the divine devotion of many mystics, in New Testament Greek, the love between God and humanity is usually rendered as “agape,” sometimes translated as “charity” in early English translations. Today we might perhaps translate it as “loving kindness” or “compassion” or “unconditional love.”
Martin Luther King Jr. describes agape as, “understanding, creative, redemptive good will toward all men. Agape is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. Theologians would say that it is the love of God operating in the human heart.” Agape is thus love both between God and humanity and between humans. This is the type of love that manifests in service.
The mystics tell us we are created in love and for love. Love that manifests in service to God, to others, and to ourselves. Hildegard von Bingen, whose vision of Creation from Love we heard earlier, wrote that God said, “With my mouth I kiss my own chosen creation. I uniquely, lovingly, embrace every image I have made out of the earth's clay. With a fiery spirit I transform it into a body to serve the world.”
In the churches I grew up in, Jesus' words were often shortened to “love your neighbour”. But Jesus, and Moses before him, didn't just say, “love your neighbour”, they said, “love your neighbour as yourself.” Loving ourselves wasn't spoken about much in church and certainly not in positive terms. Loving others was seen as self-less, while loving oneself was equated with being self-ish, self-important, and self-indulgent. But we cannot truly love others, we cannot truly love God, unless we first love ourselves.
Contemporary contemplative Christian teacher Justin Coutts writes, “To truly love God is to love what God loves and it is us which God loves most. Therefore, in the pursuit of the love of God we must begin with ourselves. When we truly love ourselves then we see ourselves as God does. Because we are the image of God we can only love God as much as we first love ourselves. If we do not love ourselves we are seeing a false image that is not of God. If we saw, with eyes truly opened, who we really are, then we would have no choice but to love ourselves. If we do not love ourselves then we do not have the truth.”
Now I acknowledge that my understanding of God is likely to be very different from that of the biblical writers. I have long since left the white-bearded old man in the clouds of my Sunday School days behind. The God of my understanding is what the theologian Paul Tillich called the “ground of being.” In other words, my God is Life itself. In loving God I love Life itself, and I am called to serve God, to serve Life, by acting in life-affirming and life-enriching ways.
In loving my neighbour, I am called to serve them, in ways that affirm and enrich their life. Who is my neighbour? In the passages from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, we are asked to love our kin, our fellow country-folk, and strangers. In other words, everyone – everyone, from my cousins to the politicians I disagree with to the people blowing each other up in Israel and Gaza.
In loving my neighbour, I am called to manifest that love in service, in good will to all, in seeking what is good for my neighbour's welfare, in acting kindly and compassionately towards them, treating them with respect and understanding. Every act of love in action, however small, from hugging a friend to donating to charity to smiling at a stranger, is an act of service that makes a difference.
In loving myself, I am called to manifest that love in service, seeking what is good for my own welfare, treating myself with kindness, compassion, respect and understanding.
May we answer the call to love God, love our neighbour, love ourselves, knowing that these three loves are indeed one and we are indeed one family, created in Love and for Love, and held in a Love larger than ourselves. Amen.
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