You Will Never Get Closer to God Than When You Do This One Thing

Photo by John French

When it comes to the spiritual life, let me tell you about the GOAT.

—St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 12:31, paraphrased prelude to his inspired ode to love.

Near the end of my Men’s Rites of Passage (MROP), our weaver, Belden Lane, one by one looked into our eyes and told us we were a Beloved Son of God. That day, those words penetrated deep into me in a way that is still unfolding. Too many men roll their eyes as soon as the word “love” is put out there. It is one of those “if you know you know” kind of things, it seems, which also implies that if you don’t know, you don’t know (yet.)

Gratefully, love has its hold on us, whether we know it or not. Wonderfully, there is no end to deeper knowing when it comes to love.

Before my MROP, I thought I was Beloved. I believed it to be true, and would have said as much if asked. But I didn’t really know it. I didn’t know it in my bones; I didn’t feel it in my gut. And as it turns out, the mere idea is somewhat impotent on its own, rattling around my head like some cold fact. The idea is still helpful as a sign that points to the real thing, but is no substitute for experience.

Now that I know it, though, I have to keep knowing it. I have to keep remembering it. Love is an ancient treasure that is a universal inheritance for all of us.

Sometimes I forget it, but love never forgets me.

Sometimes I let go of it, but love’s hold on me endures.

Love is the aim of life, full stop. I can’t think of anything more important for us all to live into.

I’ve written before about the power of love to change a life. It is everything. And the beauty of love is that it is both the ends and the means, the creative force that formed all things and the fabric of all that is. “God is love,” as St. John famously said, and the beauty of this is that love cannot be exclusively claimed by any religion, patented and metered out by any country or race, or only understood by learned scholars. Love requires no money, but it might cost you everything. Love is immaterial but is our greatest treasure in life. Love is its own cosmology, its own theology, its own justice. If there is one lens through which to view all things, it is best to choose love.

Over Thanksgiving, I wrote a letter to my nephew, a remarkable young high school student who is on a quest to know God. (He also just won Football Player of the Year for Washington State. #prouduncle.) While I think that theological discourse is important, it pales in comparison to our great falling into love. This month, I wanted to pass on what I wrote him.

I also want to invite you to write a letter to someone and feel free to post it in Illuman’s online community or mention who you’ve written to, even if you aren’t posting the entire letter. Let’s see how many of us will take the invitation to love in this way. Maybe write a letter or two to the kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews, neighbors, or perhaps especially those with whom we’ve had a falling out. Let’s put love into practice!

_______________________________

Thanksgiving 2025

Dear Nephew,

So you want to know God?

Hallelujah

You already do.

Even this desire

is not yours

But God in you

I’m writing because I wanted to just say, again, both how joyful it was to watch you play football, but even more than that, how proud I am of the young man you are becoming. Talking with you Saturday night was just delightful for me, watching you thoughtfully process all the varied streams of faith traditions as you work things out for yourself. I also loved reading your Grandma Diane’s letter, and remembering the ancestral lineage in which you and I both find ourselves.

This process of working things out will never end, and I want to encourage you to keep up the journey, though forgo the need to figure it out. What you’re seeking can’t be found in the future, only in the present moment when you realize that what you’re seeking has already been granted to you. You’re already there, even as you will yet further arrive. God is a mystery, which doesn’t mean that He/She isn’t knowable now, but rather that God is endlessly knowable in each successive now. There is no end nor beginning to knowing God, but that we will never know God fully, doesn’t mean we don’t know God now.

So keep searching, even while you honor what you’ve already found. Remember if you ever get too comfortable with your current understanding of God, then you’ve probably made a system of idolatry out of your beliefs, rather than being again and again unsettled (for the better) by a God that is always more loving, more beautiful, more wild and free, more beyond, than we imagine. They say God is not just more than we imagine; God is more than we can imagine. All our best articulations of theology are just chicken scratches in comparison to the Real Thing, so let’s not take our ideas too seriously, even as we give ourselves wholeheartedly to the dance.

This dance of life, this dance of being seduced and romanced by God, you can’t learn by studying the steps, describing the meter, or observing from the sidelines. You must let yourself be whirled around on the floor yourself! This is the only true knowing that involves not just your head, but your heart, your body, and your soul. It is simple to begin, and even simpler to deepen.

Here is the crux of what I want to say:

In the pursuit of God (or perhaps in giving yourself to God’s pursuit of you), if choosing between the cultivation of knowledge about God, or loving … always choose love.

Ideas, no matter how good and beautiful, by themselves will never get you to know God and are utterly meaningless without love, as St. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13.

Loving will always get you there, and it will do so in the blink of an eye.

To love is to know God, at some level, in that exact moment. God is love. There is no love outside of God. All true love is God’s love, belongs to God, is sourced from God, and even is God. All love originates, emanates, abides in, and returns to the Friend.

You cannot love anyone or anything without knowing, giving and receiving the Spirit.

You’ll never get closer to knowing God than in the moments you love. For love above all, is how God wants to be known, how God wants to be experienced, how God wants to create. Love is the Power of God.

There are many ways to know. We can know intellectually, we can know via muscle memory, we can know intuitively, we can know consciously and unconsciously, we can know by watching and listening, modelling and following. We can know by remembering and anticipating. We can even know by our constant connection to the collective unconscious.

But …

Knowing via loving is far more

profound and

salvific and

faithful and

soulful and

redemptive and

restorative and

forgiving and

compassionate and

justice-oriented and

righteous and

kind and

strong and

fierce and

hopeful and

grace-filled and

challenging and

(you fill in the blank) than any other way of knowing, because it directly taps all of who we are directly into God, using every way of knowing available.

The deeper you love, the more you know God. The more you know God, the deeper you can love.

The more mature of a soul and person you are, the greater capacity you’ll have to love, the greater a lover you can be, and the deeper you’ll know God.

This kind of knowing is so much bigger than our ability to articulate into words, extends way beyond our conscious and intellectual awareness, and is a knowing that is not just within us but between us and others. Unfortunately, in the West, we’ve idealized the kind of knowing that we can write down, master in our conscious mind, and control because one person can hold it within. These are wonderful ways of knowing, but are far too small a means to know God. And, if in order to know God, we needed to be literate, educated, and have the free time to read theology, how few would be able to participate! That would be a gospel of despair, for sure.

Hallelujah that this way of knowing we call love is universally available to everyone at every moment, and does not privilege the powerful, but if anything, ends up in the voluntary and joyful use and surrender of power for the healing and good of all. This way of knowing is just as available at home, in school, or in the workplace as it is in any house of worship. It doesn’t even require us to believe anything!

How amazing that wherever you find yourself, you can bring loving consciousness to the present setting, and every setting in which you love will reveal slightly different aspects of God. Loving your neighbor will reveal something about God that is different from loving your spouse, which will be different from loving the foreigner, the oppressed, the oppressor, your dog, the smell of the pine trees, or anything else.

Love passionately, and you will know God in a particular kind of way; love widely, and you’ll know God even more broadly; love yourself even, and you’ll start to clue into how God sees you, as a beloved son of God.

Like looking directly into the sun, loving God directly is not easy. Some very enlightened beings may fully give themselves to this, but honestly, most of us are a bit half-hearted—and that is ok. There is a reason for this, which we’ll maybe get to. However, if we take a fierce inventory of our lives, we must confess that we don’t want God, but perhaps we want to want God. That is sufficient for the Friend. So, while loving God directly is not as simple as loving God indirectly, by loving others and living a life in God and in love, it is sometimes an easier place to start. It is a grace that God goes around all day long “disguised as our life,” as Paula D’Arcy says, giving us a chance to love God by loving others. As Jesus put it, when we love especially the vulnerable, we unknowingly have loved God (see Matthew 25:40).

Your capacity to love is directly connected to your own awareness of your belovedness. We can love others only because we have been loved first. However, the love of God towards us can’t be just an idea in our minds. For this to have an impact, we must meditate on it long enough so it sinks deep into our bones. It helps that you already know what it is to be loved by your folks, but the love of God for you is far greater and even deeper, more joyful, more fun, more trustworthy and even more patient. This is saying something, because you have amazing parents!

Your belovedness is far deeper. You can’t earn it, can’t mar it, can’t increase or decrease it, you can’t lose it nor regain it, can’t be separated from it nor get any more connected to it than you are at this moment. Your belovedness is immutable, and it is always there, even if you aren’t aware of it. You can’t even become worthy or unworthy of it—that is a category you must abandon entirely. God’s love simply is. It is the starting place, the birthplace of all creation, the creative force which holds the entire world together. And it is deeply personal.

While I could affirm intellectually that God loved me at an early age, I didn’t learn this in my bones until my early 30s, and it changed everything. You needn’t wait that long. Once you know it, you will become unaware of it again. That’s also okay, and another time we can explore why this remembering and forgetting process is not a problem, but rather a beautiful attribute of God’s process. Frankly, most of us spend the majority of our lives largely unaware of it, even if we were aware of it at one point. When we are fully rooted in our belovedness, the whole world changes around us. We become immensely attractive to some and immensely threatening to others, but either way, beauty will blossom with each step you take.

God disguised as myriad things,

and playing a game of tag

has kissed you and said,

"You're it.

I mean you're really it.

Now it does not matter

what you believe or feel.

For something wonderful,

something major-league wonderful,

is going to happen."

—Hafiz via Daniel Ladinsky

Love is a strange word, and sadly, in our context, it is perhaps the most misunderstood word in our language. Love can be looked down on as weak, as only feminine, as idealistic, as optional, as serious, as imaginary, as emotional, as ridiculous, as dangerous or risky, and many other things as well. It is an unfortunate thing indeed. Love is beyond all of these things. Love always prioritizes the best for others above all, and it ain’t hard to see how sparks can fly as a result.

Love is a creative and constructive force, but the construction of the best sometimes requires the destruction of the lesser. Think of Jesus rampaging in the temple as an act of fierce love. Think of Martin Luther King protesting white supremacy, not because he hated his opponents but because he loved them and wanted something more just and righteous for everyone. Love might be forceful, but it will never be hateful. In being radically for something greater for everyone, it will always engender opposition, but not because it is oppositional.

In one moment, love can make us willing to sacrifice our very lives, but in the next moment, love can make us roll on the floor laughing or swing in ecstasy. Love will never force us to do something, but in our being compelled through our own sacred desires, the force of love is more powerful than just about anything I can think of.

Don’t put love in a box … she will almost always surprise us. At the very end of our lives, we will still just be getting to know her. We could write pages and pages more about what love is exactly, and what it isn’t … but the bottom line is this:

Never be stingy with love, and the rest will take care of itself.

Here is one more from Hafiz/Ladinksy on the topic:

I know the way you can get

When you have not had a drink of love:

Your face hardens,

Your sweet muscles cramp.

Children become concerned

About a strange look that appears in your eyes

Which even begins to worry your own mirror

And nose.

Squirrels and birds sense your sadness

And call an important conference in a tall tree.

They decide which secret code to chant

To help your mind and soul.

Even angels fear that brand of madness

That arrays itself against the world

And throws sharp stones and spears into

The innocent

And into one's self.

O I know the way you can get

If you have not been drinking love:

You might rip apart

Every sentence your friends and teachers say,

Looking for hidden clauses.

You might weigh every word on a scale

Like a dead fish.

You might pull out a ruler to measure

From every angle in your darkness

The beautiful dimensions of a heart you once

Trusted.

I know the way you can get

If you have not had a drink from love's

Hands.

That is why all the Great Ones speak of

The vital need

To keep remembering God,

So you will come to know and see Him

As being so Playful

And Wanting,

Just Wanting to help.

That is why Hafiz says:

Bring your cup near me.

For all I care about

Is quenching your thirst for freedom!

All a Sane man can ever care about

Is giving love!”

—Daniel Ladinsky

And how can we be so generous with ourselves and each other? Practice going around remembering that you (don’t forget this first part) and everyone you see is Beloved, and then treat them accordingly. Be astonished at their beauty, for love enjoys this kind of joyful play. And because love is not something that can be contained within you, pay attention to cultivating the flow of love between you and everyone else. Remember, love is not limited to humans. Look to the whole of creation in this exercise. There is no place where love has not left its mark, and even now it is waiting to bloom.

That is all for now … If you’ve made it this far in one sitting, that is more than I can say! Ha!

Much love,

Uncle Ned