Image and Likeness of God: Love and Community

       “God Loves me,” teaches Monsignor Buchignani, and that needs to be the first thing we consider when we contemplate Faith and how we are to become who we are made to be…our Authentic Self. But before God Loves us, God Loves Himself. That is, within the Trinity, the Father Loves the Son, the Son Loves the Spirit, the Spirit Loves the Father, and the cycle continues, perpetually. A professor in graduate school taught us about the Loving nature of God. If we assume that the nature of God is this Agapic, self-giving Love that never ends, my professor asked, “Who was God Loving before He created us?” What a great question! My students actually Love this question. It is something they have never really considered. My most clever students deconstruct the question. “Mr. Smith, God is outside of time and space. Time and space are dimensions that we experience. There is no ‘before’ for God”. Despite their you’re-so-dumb-Mr.-Smith attitude I appreciate what they have to say. They are right, so I acknowledge their superior intelligence and ask them to indulge the question. If there was a time (or an eternity) where we did not exist, and if God is Love then God could not be God’s self unless there was an object of that nature to Love and to be Loved. The only logical response to the question is that before God Loved us and was Loved by us, God Loved Himself and was Loved by Himself. This is the foundation of Theological Anthropology. God is Love which means He is both Lover and Beloved. St. Augustine describes it this way. Unless God was community (Trinity), God could not be Love because Love suggests both one who Loves and one who is Beloved. Therefore, the image and likeness of God is both Love (Agape) and community (Trinity). All of this occurs before time and before space and is, further, not limited to material Truth. The nature of God, the Trinity, is transcendent. The Truest nature of Love and Community is so perfect and beyond human intellect…we cannot rely on human definitions of Love and Community. All we can really know is that Trinitarian Love is oriented to the greater community if God in the Trinity and it involves a perfect self-gift of one’s will.

(Henri keeps watch on the neighborhood)