Absence, Or The Love Of Things And God

To truly love a thing is to love its absence more than its presence. To love something is to love nothing.

Natural love: a possession.

"I can't imagine life without you"

"And because of your guidance, my dear God, I found salvation"

"I am a successful engineer"

If I were to place a lens over my eyes that tinted the world red, I would say that the sky is red. The orientation of the lens would not matter; the fundamentally blue sky would be painted red. Natural love is the result of a likened lens.

The subject of love. It is the "I", whatever that may be, that perceives the object: a partner; God; a career. Natural love is relational.

Relational love is both the most beautiful thing and the most despairful thing. Beautiful in the way that it produces roots, devotion, and other needs for human actualization. Despairful in the way that it produces rot, idolatry, and degeneration of reality. It is both humanity embodied and humanity untethered.

Consider a depressed man living in squalor: his home lacks warmth and comfort. If that depressed man, on a routine walk, found himself to look through a neighbor's window and see a thoughtfully decorated home, adorned with string lights and other comforts, and he were bitter from the disparity, society would renounce him. His love for his neighbor only extends to the point where his absence is not illustrated. If he were to feel a calm happiness that some person in the world had what he did not, society would praise him. We implicitly praise the supernatural power of grace.

Grace. Love without possession. To love absence more than presence.

An orientation towards grace can be trained. It is strengthened through the recognition of the humanity of others, and most importantly in the fulfillment of the core, natural obligation: respect for another.

But the rot of relational love is foundational to the human spirit: a necessity to be rooted to this world as human. A common visitor of grace is excruciating pain, or the pulling of roots from the spirit. The supernatural aspect of grace is the purification of the lens through suffering.

Any love for God is only pure through the suffering of abandonment. To love Him is to love his absence.

The love of God, taken to its highest form, is no different than atheism.