Only love is real
Reflecting on a popular spiritual maxim.
If you’ve spent any time in the New Age, you’ve probably heard the expression “only love is real”. The implied meaning is that anything like fear, suffering, anger, or pain is an illusion. These illusions include the devil himself. He’s normally taken to be, rather than a real being, the ultimate expression of the fear-based desires and drives of the human ego. Fear seems to separate us from love but this separation is only ever an illusion which disappears with a change of perspective. The devil, too, can be dissolved into the only true reality, love, through a shift into a higher state of consciousness.
But the statement “only love is real” is also true from a Christian perspective. God is love, and God is ultimate reality, so ultimate reality is love. Everything real is love; or, only love is real. Christians can also say that the devil is not real, insofar as he, the father of lies, functions as the ultimate denial of reality in his attempt to deny God. He deals in deception and always tries to lead us into unreality as a mechanism of leading us away from God. He’s like a black void; an emptiness, a nothingness. As has been famously said: he cannot create, he can only destroy.
I think we can say that only love is real, but that the problem lies in claiming that everything that is not love is an illusion. Ironically, this is what the devil wants us to do: to deny reality. I came into Christianity with the assumption that my fear and worry and suffering were illusions that I just needed to “see through”. My chaplain noticed this during our conversations preparing me for baptism and offered the Christian view. He said to me, “God takes our suffering seriously.” That changed everything for me. I was so used to thinking that I basically had to deny the existence of my fear and pain. Realising that I no longer needed to felt like taking in a deep lungful of fresh air. Truth always feels like that, because Truth is Christ.
Here I was presented with a God who took our suffering so seriously — who took me so seriously — that he dove right into the depths of the human mess and suffered, still suffers, alongside us, “to the point of death, even death on a cross.” Christ’s death and resurrection mean, not that our suffering is not real or did not happen, but that it has not won. It doesn’t have the final word about us: about our lives and about who we are. However little it may seem so in this world, love is stronger than death; love has defeated death. Our suffering is not meaningless, not something to be ignored or discarded, but something that is dignified and glorified in Christ.
Likewise with our sin: God takes it seriously, and that gives us dignity — whereas denying the reality of our sin also denies us our dignity. The truth is that however much we meditate, regulate, align, we’re still going to snap one day and beep at someone in a traffic jam or speak harshly to a loved one in a way that we immediately regret. We are not perfectly enlightened beings of love — we’re human, and to be human is to mess up quite a lot. Does it actually help us to say that these mistakes are not really us, but rather some unenlightened part of us — our egos? Does it help us to deny the reality of those moments?
And what about the really big mistakes? The ones we manage to forget about during the day but which crawl up onto our chests at night and sit there, weighing us down? The thing from a long time ago, “the worst thing I ever did.” Can it truly not be real if it keeps me awake at night? Is there dignity in denying its reality — dignity for me or for the person I hurt? I find much more dignity in what God offers: the opportunity to fully acknowledge what we did, to repent of it, and then to be forgiven. God says, “yes, you did do that terrible thing. It happened. It matters, because you matter.” God sets us free by taking our sins seriously, by taking us seriously. Denying our sins only keeps us trapped — which, again, is where the devil wants us. The truth will set you free, the lie will keep you imprisoned.
Our deeds and our mistakes matter to God because of the dignity we have in his eyes. When we repent of our sins and he forgives us, a shift in identity takes place. God says to us, “this no longer has the final world about you.” We return from being primarily an adulterer, or liar, or bully, to a beloved child of God. We were living from that old identity, and our regret, but God gives us a new identity in Christ and we must now live from that place of belovedness. Forgiveness is “conversion of the penitent’s life, from a situation in which the word he or she hears and must live by is ‘you are a cheat and a coveter,’ to one in which the word he or she hears and must live by is ‘You are Jesus’ beloved.’”1
This is the difference between a personal and an impersonal God, between understanding love as exclusively relational or as an abstract force. The New Age perspective kind of equates love with Brahman, making it the pure consciousness, the highest vibration, the ultimate creativity underlying all illusory forms. Our egos are illusions, while our true selves are part of this consciousness. Our separateness is an illusion: really, we are all one. We are called to dissolve our egos and all their fears into this pure consciousness. But while this message of oneness might sound spiritually comforting, it can sometimes be a denial of our full humanity and aliveness. Our egos are also our individualities. If we dissolve them, there is nothing left of who we are.
In the Christian perspective, love is also the ground of being. God is love, so love is God, which means that Christians literally worship love (although you wouldn’t know it most of the time because of all the ways we turn God into something other than love to make him easier to worship). But love is never abstract; it is always relational. Love can only be love when it is directed at another. It cannot be an impersonal force. God can only be love because he is a trinity and the persons of the trinity love each other. And God loves us — he loves each of us individually. In the Christian perspective our individualities are not illusions to be dissolved; rather they are cherished. Each of us is known and loved intimately. We are unique, unrepeatable, and wonderfully made.
In her ‘Showings’, Christ said to Julian of Norwich that all suffering shall be turned to glory and all sin shall be turned to honour. Rather than dissolving our fear and pain, denying its existence, Christ will instead transmute it into love. In the end, all things will be reconciled to him and he will be all in all. Our suffering and sin are not illusions. They are real. And if they are real they are also somehow love as well, because they will be turned into love; because they are held in love and will be reconciled to love. They do not have the final say. Rather, as love had the first word about us, it will also have the last.
Robert W. Jenson, read on Fr Kimel’s blog: https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2020/09/23/preaching-good-good-very-good-news-the-grammar-of-apokatastasis/