God the Eternal Other
Love Your Neighbor as Yourself
I'm about to do something dangerous - speak on the nature of God.
When it comes to our modern understanding of God, the utmost care must be taken. We seem to have a veil of misunderstanding over us, and have far less of a connection to the divine compared to our ancestors. Many reasons exist for this disconnection, but it feels true nonetheless.
Yet we must continue to strive for understanding of Him, if only because our souls crave that Communion.
Divinity & Family
The Trinity is a Holy Mystery in Christianity, one of the deepest theological points. I won't pretend to understand it, but I do want to expound upon one piece of it:
The Trinity is a family.
Why would God be a family? Instead of a single person domineering, or loving, or partying? How does relationship fit into the divine?
To understand these questions, we need to dive a bit into the nature of the Self, and the Other. When we experience being a Self, we in one way cut ourself off from the world around us. We form a concretized identity as "not-that," whether "that" refers to other beings, other places, or other times.
Whenever a Self arises, an Other naturally arises as well. You cannot have Subject without Object, or in another way, Being (who I am) without Non-Being (who I am not.)
I believe God is not only a single Person, and instead exists in relationship, because our families involve the closest relationships in our lives. The people who, naturally, are most closely identified with our Self, but also most Other, because we know them deeply and we know that we are quite different.
God is in some ways the Eternal Other.
He fills all things that are not our Self, because He is the Ground of Being. As the hymn says, He is "everywhere present and filling all things."
When we yearn to grow on the divine path, we must love God unto annihilation. We must throw ourselves towards Him, cry out to him, begging him "Lord! Force me to become holy!"
Through this process, we are allowing the Other into our Self. We are breaking down the barrier between Us and Them, Being and Not-Being, Self and Other. By opening our hearts fully to God, we allow Him to be born in us. Surrendering to His Will, becoming a slave at His feet, grants us the blessed chance to rise into holiness, far beyond all the Cherubim and the Seraphim. God has given us this chance because He loves us, as a Father loves a Son.
May we rise as He did.
