We need love

God is not a being among other beings, but rather the Ground of Being itself which then flows through all beings. As Paul says to the intellectuals in Athens, this God “is not far from us, but is the one in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27-28). The God whom Jesus reveals is presented as unhindered dialogue, a positive and inclusive flow, and a waterwheel of outpouring love that never stops! St. Bonaventure (c. 1221–1274) called God a “fountain fullness” of love.

                                                                                  Richard Rohr

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I think God is having an identity crisis

Or rather, I think there is a  crisis in the way we see God

Today some of the cruelest, least empathic people I know

Are those who claim to be God’s people

The list of their cruelties, both petty and profound

Is exhaustive

They have chosen the way of abuse power

Of greed

Of bullying

Of violence

They have chosen to invoke the name of God

And the name of Jesus to justify all kinds of ills

Including injustice

They hide behind shallow versions of righteousness

Claiming to be pro-life because they are against abortion,

But at the same time dooming living children to lives of poverty and despair

Happily cheering legislation that ruins lives

They support a man who is so antithetical to the way of Jesus

as to be rightfully called antichrist (not The AntiChrist)….

and I think it is because of how they see God

The Bible offers us a tortured changing understanding of God to be sure

But when God, tired perhaps of all the ways we misunderstand,

finally chose to come among us, it became clear

God is love

If God is love, then love is that from which we all emerge

(created in God’s image)

The world we live in is, fundamentally, love

(although we treat it poorly, and so the earth is ill and showing the symptoms

 of that illness)

And each one of us

Every person created

Is fundamentally love

No matter the color, creed, culture, language, economic status, education level

No matter the political affiliation

We are love

But somewhere we lost this

And God became something other than love

God became separate

Looming

Powerful (to be sure)

But also  vindictive and retributive

God became tribal (My god)

And God became the excuse

For the abuse of power

For coercion

For hate

For violence

For cruelty (there we are again)

If we do not “live and breathe and have our being”

in the real God, in the God who is love

then we are simply free radicals

we are simply those

separated from Go (for all our rhetoric)

acting out all those aspects of our nature that are not God

This is the failure of American Evangelicals

But they are not alone

This has happened throughout history

Any time people have decided to merge faith with earthly power

Any time people have mixed faith with tribalism (what we call patriotism)

And it happens to all of us, from time to time.

Even to me

Event to you (I suspect)

What happens is God becomes a weapon

Used to control and manipulate

Used to justify prejudice and hate

Used to coerce

We need a new God

Or rather

We need the true God

We need that God who is love

The one who is with us

And in us

The one who cries with us

And mourns with us

The one who cares for the little ones

For the least of these

The one who hovers over us

We need the God who welcomes the immigrant (stranger) with open arms

Who cries with the mother who must abort an unviable fetus

Who hides with the child under her desk at school, as yet another gunman wanders the halls.

Who walks with the black youth through the fearful, deadly streets

Who cries with the parent who can’t afford medical care for their child

We need the God who lives inside us

And is an outpouring of love that never stops

That God who impels us to feed the hungry

Welcome the stranger

Fight for justice for all

Clothe the naked

House the homeless

The God who

Accepts and forgives

Who sees the potential in each person

And seeks to lift each person up

We need

The God who is love