Reflection

A professor of mine asked a question to start class yesterday: What would it mean if we could ground everything we say about God in our sense of standing in awe before God?

It would mean, I think, a renewed humility, a renewed sense that we are all like Paul, who admitted that he could only "see in a mirror, dimly." (1 Cor. 13:12) It would mean we were slower to judge, quicker to feel our own dependence, more cognizant of our limits. This is something all Christians interested in public dialogue should remember.

Later in class, the professor gave an interpretation of the Trinity as relationship. The Trinity, he said, showed that God could not be contained in Godself. His character is always to be outpouring, creating, and raising life from the dead. This outflow of creation, I think, defines what God's love is.

These two ideas -- the awe before God and creative love that characterizes God -- fit together. Paul's admission of his limited knowledge in 1 Cor. 13: 12 (cited above), comes in the middle of a passage on the centrality of love. Paul says is v. 2: "If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing."

To me, the link is this: Standing in awe before God means experiencing God's creative love and reflecting that out into the world. Loving, then, trumps all our efforts at theology, knowledge, political accomplisment, etc. Without love, believing in God and knowing about God count for little. God calls us to loving acts, not just to pious shows of personal faith or intellectual reflection. It's a call I, and we, need to hear as individuals and has a society.