The Need to Love
The Need to Love is Deeper Than the Need to be Loved
Saint Thomas Aquinas remarks that “love is born of an earnest consideration of the object loved.” And: “love follows knowledge.” Love is an emotional response aroused in the will by visions of the good. Contrary to what is often said, love is never blind, though it may not see rightly. It cannot exist without some vision of the beloved.
As teachers, we therefore bring the lovely thing—in this case, God—before the disciple as fully and as forcibly as possible, putting our best efforts into it. But we never forget that in the last analysis, as we learn from Emily Dickinson, “the soul selects her own society, then shuts the door.” Though we act as intelligently and responsibly as possible, we are always in the position of asking: asking them, asking God, and responding to responses.
God has placed the only key to the innermost parts of the human soul in its own hands and will never take it back to himself or give it to another. You may even destroy the soul of another, but you will never unlock it against his or her will. The soul, to continue the words of Dickinson can “close the valves of her attention, like stone.” She can even lose the key, and have to have help finding it. She can even refuse the help she desperately needs. But she will never cease to need to love, which is deeper than the need to be loved.
...If anyone is to love God and have his or her life filled with that love, God in his glorious reality must be brought before the mind and kept there in such a way as that the mind takes root and stays fixed there. The individual must be willing for this to happen. This is to be done in such a way that love for and delight in God’s will be elicited and established as the pervasive orientation of the whole self. It will fill the mind of the willing soul and progress toward an easy and delightful governance of the entire personality.
The Divine Conspiracy (p. 323, 324) - Dallas Willard
Saint Thomas Aquinas remarks that “love is born of an earnest consideration of the object loved.” And: “love follows knowledge.” Love is an emotional response aroused in the will by visions of the good. Contrary to what is often said, love is never blind, though it may not see rightly. It cannot exist without some vision of the beloved.
As teachers, we therefore bring the lovely thing—in this case, God—before the disciple as fully and as forcibly as possible, putting our best efforts into it. But we never forget that in the last analysis, as we learn from Emily Dickinson, “the soul selects her own society, then shuts the door.” Though we act as intelligently and responsibly as possible, we are always in the position of asking: asking them, asking God, and responding to responses.
God has placed the only key to the innermost parts of the human soul in its own hands and will never take it back to himself or give it to another. You may even destroy the soul of another, but you will never unlock it against his or her will. The soul, to continue the words of Dickinson can “close the valves of her attention, like stone.” She can even lose the key, and have to have help finding it. She can even refuse the help she desperately needs. But she will never cease to need to love, which is deeper than the need to be loved.
...If anyone is to love God and have his or her life filled with that love, God in his glorious reality must be brought before the mind and kept there in such a way as that the mind takes root and stays fixed there. The individual must be willing for this to happen. This is to be done in such a way that love for and delight in God’s will be elicited and established as the pervasive orientation of the whole self. It will fill the mind of the willing soul and progress toward an easy and delightful governance of the entire personality.
The Divine Conspiracy (p. 323, 324) - Dallas Willard
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