“Love is from God,” St John says. “Everyone who loves is a child of God.”
This experience of loving God is rooted in our capacity to be loved. And it’s the great quality of a child that a child wants to be loved. It’s the most natural thing; perhaps the only thing a child wants with its whole being is to be loved. It is that child-like capacity to be loved that we recover through meditation, our deepest and truest identity as a child of God. And it is this self-knowledge of ourselves as a child of God – wanting to be loved, and accepting the poverty, the vulnerability of needing to be loved – it’s that which heals us. It’s that self-knowledge, that vision of reality that heals us and heals the whole person; and the whole person includes the psychological reality that we are as a child of our parents, as a husband or wife, or friend, or brother or sister, or whatever. This psychological reality that we spend most of our time thinking about, struggling with, is a real part of us, but it is not the whole person. Here’s the basic difference between the path of the spirit and the path of psychology. Our deepest identity is our identity as a child of God, and it is by discovering that and knowing that, that we release cosmic powers of healing and renewal.
(Aspects of Love 3 by Laurence Freeman OSB )
