Article May 12, 2008 Issue

LIVES TRANSFORMED BY LOVE

BY ALLISON PHINNEY

IF ORDINARY PEOPLE, not particularly religious, were asked to think of one thing in the world that might have a healing effect on the sickness, grief, or craziness of human life—without pills, therapy, or other medical procedures—a surprising number might simply choose love.

Since genuine love is felt so deeply by almost everyone, whether within families or friendships, for children, or even for complete strangers, it's a nearly instinctive response. In everyday life, passers-by have pulled people unknown to them from flaming cars or plucked them from subway tracks just before the train came. In many instances, attentive human love has been strong enough to carry a family member through serious illness. Accounts of this sort are so powerfully appealing that they tend to turn up frequently in world and local news reports and circulate extensively on the Internet.

But what if this love that human beings value so much were an indication of something far bigger? So big, in fact, that even beginning to grasp it could change your whole perception of life and the universe, yourself included? What if the love we're familiar with isn't the fleeting best of mortal life, but instead is an expression of a larger, deeper love that is always there to be found? Could it be that whenever we experience the goodness and the peace and the expansiveness of unselfed human love, we're actually feeling in some degree the vast actuality of that larger love that is God? The Bible says precisely that in a passage in I John: "... love is of God" (4:7).

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