God’s love can compensate for the lack of any other love

It is always so hard it seems unbearable sometimes. It turns out to be really impossible for some poor souls because many suicides are committed on account of unrequited love. ‘For love is strong as death’, Scripture says. (Song of Solomon 8.6).

If a mutual love has turned into a one-way passion, any words of consolation sound as insincere and poor as the thoughts of Job’s friends,- words that seemed to be reasonable though they were said due to some other reasons. Love between people is a beautiful and noble feeling. Nevertheless, our love to God should be much stronger. In this case the loss of human love will be a wound, probably a very painful one, but not fatal. You see, the love between God and a human being can be unrequited only from the human’s side. Our Lord will never stop loving us and nothing can make Him turn away from us. We are the ones who turn away from Him. Those who manage to love God ‘with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind’ (Mk 12.30) will never be miserable even if the whole world turns away from them.

Many of us cannot comprehend why God so insistently demands that we love Him. Sometime this requirement is expressed in words that seem too strict, ‘Whoever loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.’ (Mt 10.37). However, love to God is not opposed to the love to men but it is the cornerstone of love. The more you love God the deeper and more complete is your love towards people. Then the loss of mutuality in love won’t be catastrophic. The love of God is so grand that it can compensate for the lack of any other love. You just have to believe it. Of course, you’d better not only know about the Lord’s love but feel it as well.

The fact that God loves us is the first thing we learn when joining the Church. However, we don’t always feel it in our hearts. Probably the essence of the spiritual life is in the following – faith should not be just our world-view or a sum of truths that we agree with and intend to follow, but instead our faith should be a meeting with the living God, experiencing the mutual love with Him who is Love Himself. The more vividly it happens in our life the more firm we can be surviving the loss we’ve just talked about.