What Do I Actually Love When I Love God?
Japanese philosopher Kirtaro Nishida said that religion is a raft that sails on the endless sea. If so, then we must be vigilant that we don't allow our preoccupation with the business on the raft to displace God's business, which is love.
I like Meister Eckhart's prayer. "I pray God to rid me of god," which is a prayer to the ocean of God to rid us of the gods of the raft.
Legalism is passion for God gone mad. It's an unconscious attempt to shrink the love of God down to a determinate set of beliefs and practices, to make an idol of something woven from the cloth of contingency; it's one more case of Aaron and the golden calf, one more confusing attempt that in the end mistakes the raft for the ocean.
Legalism represents a failure to see that the love of God is uncontainable and can assume uncountable and unaccountably different forms. It can quickly close the open-ended question, "what do I love when I love my God" with an fixed answer that traps ones passion for God within a literal formulation and binds their faith into a finite form instead of allowing it to open up into the infinite.
Question: Do we know what we love when we love our God?
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Fred Peatross
