Somebody asked me at a recent retreat if God loves us. The answer is both yes and no, and in this essay we explore why. From the deepest perspective, God does not love you – because there is no separate ‘you’ to be loved. Your being and God’s being are utterly one, leaving no distance in which a relationship could arise. Yet from the perspective of the apparent individual, it is equally true to say that God loves you, for the felt sense of that oneness in relationship is what we call love. This essay unfolds the seeming paradox and traces it back to the nature of being itself.
The Space Within Which Everything Appears
Take the room in which you are now sitting. It consists of the four walls plus the space. Five hundred years ago there was no building, no walls, only the vast, borderless, unlimited space of the universe.
When the building was constructed, the space seemed to acquire a shape, a size, a location, an age and a character – a name and a form.
But what happened to the actual space? Was the space modified in any way? Did it cease being the vast, borderless, unlimited space of the universe and become a temporary, finite space? Or did it remain as it essentially is?
