Love Divine

Actor Lena Headey was on the radio yesterday talking about her relationship with the Hindu god Ganesh.

[On a trip to India] I picked up a very ancient Ganesh and carried it in my backpack … I felt, this is just extremely peaceful to me, and it makes sense … I don’t sit and pray, but in my daily move around the world, I think about him. I love him. I love what he represents, I genuinely ask him to help me when I’m stuck … he’s my one constant.

Ms Headey is white, English and born in Bermuda. She doesn’t consider herself a Hindu by belief, but has what’s obviously an intense connection with the unlikely figure of the elephant-headed deity, who has a presence in Swanvale Halt in the form of a little statuette in the Post Office as the family who run it have a Hindu background. It makes me ponder what Christian love for God really means, in terms of its content.

Perhaps surprisingly, love for God isn’t that big a theme in the New Testament. St Paul mentions it in passing in a couple of places, but he is far keener to stress God’s love for us and ours for each other, flowing from God’s. Even the Blessed Apostle John whose first Letter is all about love is anxious to tell us that love consists in the fact ‘not that we loved God, but that he loved us’. The kind of intense personalised emotion we tend to find expressed in many modern worship songs isn’t really present in the Scriptures. There is adoration at what God is, and exultation at what he has done; there is a beneficent restfulness and gratitude that comes from knowing that ultimately everything is all right. It’s a philosophical sort of love, which is not to say it is not deep and powerful, but that it comes from applying a universal divine action to oneself. Another element that is missing is the intense focus on the humanity of Jesus which was so strong an element of medieval piety. Notoriously, St Paul says next to nothing about the earthly life of the Lord at all, and it took a thousand and more years before Christians began to meditate seriously on the features of that life which made him vulnerable, which brought the Godhead closest to the creation. If we’re talking about love in the way we normally understand it, that sense of Christ needing us (that is, human beings) for his protection, and his suffering, opens a different avenue towards it.

Unlike Ganesh, God is not one image. He is at once the glorious light to be adored, and the unfathomable abyss of ultimate being to be lost in. He is the baby held in a woman’s arms and the man crucified. He is historical and eternal. A parent looks at a child as they grow older, or a lover at their long-term love who they have grown along with, and can see all they were, and what they will be too, is present in what they are. We see God that way, and in that gaze is the tenderness of love, knowing that the beloved also loves us.