Love gives the beloved a sense of being and purpose.

We were created for communion. God is a communion of love between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Made in His image, we are each one of us created for a distinct purpose: the teleological goal of entering into and experiencing, in some fashion unknown to us on this side of death, this divine union of love. We have been created for love and we seek love.

Without love, life becomes a tedium of various degrees. To be loved creates a whole human being. In reading stories of so many of the people who did dreadful acts in this world, the commonality among them is that they were not loved. From childhood on, they experienced life as a barren island, a place where no one cared for them, listened to their hearts, held their hands in sympathy, wept with their sorrows. Such barrenness has the ability to create a soulless monster who will resort to any number of actions to deaden the pain.

This is the story of the addict as much as the tyrant. The addict uses pleasure to numb the pain of existence:

The man or woman starved for love will find some substitute which feels like the dopamine rush of love. For me, it began with marijuana and quickly escalated to the point I was close to death, burned out after four years of intense hedonism. The saddest part is that when I did once find someone who loved me, someone of whom just the thought created in me a sensation of pleasure, I lost her because my behavior had become warped by years of bizarre acting out in search of the next dopamine high. I had no purpose in life but to get high, thus, when Robin Davis came into my life, I was unable to turn from the falsity of my life to respond to her love as something real and good. I believe it wasn’t long before she sensed that I was a warped human being and that she was better off without me.

When, after the fall of mankind in Adam, the light of the knowledge of God was lost, and mankind was plunged into moral and spiritual darkness, the attempt to understand God was warped by this darkness. Only a darkened mind would conceive of a deity who demanded human sacrifice in order to do good to those offering the sacrifice. The cries of millions of babies, cast onto the altar of the demon Baal, the blood of every man, woman, and child killed on the Mayan and Aztec altars to their gods, cries out that man has no knowledge of God whatsoever. This darkness continued even with the Jews, who were recipients of the knowledge of God through the Law and the Prophets. Rebuked by the Prophet Jeremiah – Jeremiah 19:5 “They have built also the high places of Baal, to burn their sons with fire for burnt offerings unto Baal, which I commanded not, nor spake it, neither came it into my mind:” – the Israelite children pushed on in spiritual darkness, thinking God to be demanding of such sacrifices.

Even after the revelation of God’s infinite and unfathomable love in Jesus Christ, scarcely a few centuries passed before mankind once again described God not as love, but as a demanding and fearful deity who would burn forever even babies who were not baptized. Can one really feel that God is love when the vision we have been given of Him is more like Molech than Jesus? Can I feel warmth and love for a deity who holds me over the fires of hell like some wretched spider or filthy insect? [1] I may react out of fear of punishment, doing all the things my religious masters want me to do in obedience to their whims, but it will not be out of love. And in turn, I will be a warped human being who is miserable to live with.

What we are seeing today in a world filled with violence is a world of people who have never experienced love. Sociologists have pointed out that the commonality among the violent young men who prowl the streets of our major cities is that they lack a father. The “Single Parent Family” is a breeding ground for criminals. The affirmation they need from a father and mother comes from the gang they join. Their sense of worth is proven by accepting the initiation rite of some criminal act. A strange sense of worth comes from having stolen a purse, randomly attacking an innocent passerby, or even killing a stranger. The child is no longer worthless, he is now an honored member of the gang. He is no longer powerless; he controls his life.

Those who have never known love have a hard time feeling compassion for others. Thus, the tyrant, the bully, the one who acts out the pain of the loneliness in his heart by victimizing others. I believe that underneath the worst of sadists who ever lived is a young boy or girl who was brutalized at a young age, treated as a mere thing, physically or mentally tortured beyond all comprehension in ways that would make us shudder if we knew exactly what was done to them. Every act of sadism is an act of revenge against a past which haunts them. Their tormentors may long be dead and gone, but the people they harm are substitutes for what they wish they could have done to the ones who tormented them.

Lacking a sense of worth and/or purpose, the neglected child grows up seeking to find that sense, often in ways that are harmful to others. A child who grows up sensing that his worth is based solely on how much money he is worth will become like John D. Rockefeller, a man who ruthlessly crushed his competitors and promoted devious plans to make money. In a strange psychological twist, children who are sexually abused become promiscuous, becoming the very thing that they hate. My daughter was married to a man who as a child was violently beaten by his father. He, in turn and unknown to me, grew up an alcoholic who beat my daughter until she had enough and got rid of him.

In a session with my spiritual director, I was speaking of these things in my life and how they seem to have passed on to my children, much to my sorrow. He smiled, in his gracious and loving way, and said, “Ah yes. Dysfunctional behavior. It’s the gift that just keeps on giving.” That may seem a bit of a cold response, but he was making a point. The effects of being unloved pass from generation to generation, very often against the will of the person suffering. I did not want to be like my father, who seemed some days as if he never wanted kids. And while I made a good effort to not be like him, in small ways like telling my children “I love you” (something I never heard from my father to the day he died), there was still too much of him that remained in my relationship with my children.

And perhaps this is why we have two kinds of spiritual people today in this world: those who don’t want anything to do with religion or God, and those who are a dysfunctional religious mess. The first class are those who are horrified at the idea of “love” that would send a person to eternal torment. They don’t want anything to do with such a “god,” and are either atheists or culturally religious, that is, it is expected for reasons of culture or family, so they attend, but their religion ends when their religious service ends. Whatever religious practice they do assuages their conscience and makes them feel they have done what needs to be done. They do whatever they desire, not understanding that love never hurts the object of its affection. If they loved God, if they saw Christ loving them on the Cross unto death, sin would never find a place of affection in their hearts. Ultimately, they are selfish, and their religion is something in their lives similar to being in a bowling league. It’s there, they do it and enjoy it, but it does not captivate their very lives in ways that make them reach out in love to God and others. When I say that they don’t want anything to do with religion, I am talking about faith in God being the primary reason of their lives. They don’t really want a serious relationship with Christ because that might mean they would have to give up on the god they really worship – themselves. So they go to church, put on airs, and fool a lot of folks. For these people, God is distant, and they are happy to keep Him as such.

The second class of people are those who dread God. They are fundamentalists, found in every religion in the world. Every time there is a religious service, they are there. They are fastidious to annoyance about proper understanding of religious texts, fasting, and any other practices to be observed so that God will not smite them in His wrath. Their behavior is not done out of love, but rather out of a deep fear of the next life. Their life is a constant performance which says, “I must make God love me.” They are so scared of spending eternity in the fires of hell that they will submit to anything that their religious leader tells them is the will of God. I know this personally and have sat under and obeyed the theological tyrants who have used this fear to obtain their personal goals. God is not love, He is demanding, and you better obey, or else. I can still remember a “revival service” at a fundamentalist church I attended years ago. It was “tithing night,” that night in the revival when the evangelist will shake the money out of your pocket by telling you that if you don’t give, God will get what is His anyway.

The story he told was of a man who was poor and struggling to make ends meet. This man decided to skip tithing one Sunday. Sure enough, that week, his car broke down, and wouldn’t you know it, the repair bill came to the same amount as the tithe. Right to the very penny! This is the same God we were told was going to throw Roman Catholics and others who didn’t believe in Jesus in just the right way (i.e., the fundamentalist way) into hell forever. I drank in this theological bilge water like it was nectar and it made me a miserable person to be around. My children, hearing a constant litany of these threats, decided that this God was not someone particularly appealing.

Take both of these types and ask yourself this simple question: what if they came to believe in their heart of hearts in a loving heavenly Father who was never angry with them, was doing everything for their good, and would never think of burning His children forever for their errors and sins? What if they really felt that love? What if every child ever born experienced the sense of well-being which comes from knowing that you are cared for? What if they grew up not only experiencing this love but sharing it with others in the myriad of ways which say, “I love you.” Kindness, encouragement, being there in times of trouble, taking up the burdens of others, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, caring for the sick? Do you think this world might be different if such love was the common experience rather than the rarity?

I am not saying that such love would create a paradise on earth. Our brokenness, our problems, our selfishness would still have an effect on earth. What I am suggesting is that perhaps more love and less threats would change hearts and thus change our society. There are numerous examples of Christ’s followers going into the worst and most violent situations imaginable and through the constant expression of love, winning the hearts of men and women practicing evil and turning them from it. True self-giving, self-sacrificing love has a power that can turn hearts.

Maybe I’m being Pollyannish, but maybe love really is all we need.

[1] “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.” Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God – Jonathan Edwards.