Love is All You Need

Corinthians 13:13 –

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

 The Beatles once sang that “Love is all you need.” They almost had it right. It should have been, “Love is All”. Love is the only thing you can take with you. Love is the only thing that each and every normal individual craves. Without love we experience a void that we try to fill in other ways, but none of them satisfy the way love does. Nothing else comes close to filling that void. Love is All. A simple statement for sure. But what do I mean by it? You know when I was a very young man, I used to contemplate all the great mysteries of life. I would sit outside on a hot summer night and look up at the stars letting my imagination run wild. My brother and I used to argue about what was on the other side of the end of space. Infinity was something neither of us could get our heads around. My brother argued that the universe had to have a boundary. We had heard a little about the so-called Big Bang Theory. According to this theory, space itself is expanding like a toy balloon at a kid’s birthday party. I never accepted that theory as a kid. “If it has borders that were expanding, what was on the other side of those borders,” I would ask. There had to be something right? What was the universe expanding into? “Nothing”, my brother assured me. There was nothing on the other side of the border. “Well, how far does this nothing go,” I asked? “It just goes on forever,” he said. I thought that this nothing had to be pretty darn big then. It must be way bigger than the universe that was by definition everything. Then I imagined that if I could go far enough above it all and look at this infinity of nothing, I might spot the universe in the midst of it like a tiny grain of sand in an endless ocean. From that perspective, the universe wasn’t so big after all.

  That was the humble beginning of my endeavors to understand the cosmos. I first read about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in high school, and my mind really got itself in gear trying to figure the whole thing out. Einstein set me on a path of exploration that has taken me in so many different directions at once. I’m still not so sure Einstein was right about everything he proposed. But one of the concepts that fascinated me was his attempts to reconcile what he called the “weak” and “strong” forces of gravity which, he thought, if he could just manage that, he would have his Holy Grail of a unified theory of everything. I started thinking a lot about gravity then too. At the same time I was contemplating all the great scientific mysteries, I was also wrestling with the religious ones as well. I remember the first time I came across the statement, “God is Love.”  My family weren’t church goers. I wasn’t indoctrinated in anyone’s belief system as a child. I pretty much came up with my own beliefs. For starters, I never doubted that there was a God who created the universe even though no one had assured me at this point that there was indeed a creator of everything. All of nature’s intricate patterns, designs, laws were God’s handiwork, no doubt, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t know what to think about the rest of religious dogma, but that much I was certain about.

  Somehow, while pondering all these things, I had a flash of insight that told me that God’s Love and the mysterious force of gravity might be one and the same thing. Don’t ask me how. But here’s how it appeared to me - there’s this mysterious, invisible, unexplainable force that emanates from the center of Earth pulling me and everything else towards the center, right? And this force has nothing to do with electric fields or magnetic lines or electro-magnetism as it were. Then what is gravity and what generates it – where does it come from? And how does such a force pull on me in just such a manner as not to ever crush me or allow me to go floating off into space? I began to imagine God’s love as this force that fills his creation. His love holds me to the ground of this ball of matter we call planet Earth that is spinning so very frighteningly fast around its own axis and at the same time making a hasty orbit around the sun and simultaneously going on a tear around the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy not to mention the presumably incredible journey into that void of nothingness my brother and I used to contemplate. With so much tremendous motion involved, still I’m held gently but firmly to the surface of the world. And they call that the “weak” force of gravity! They call it weak because you can defy it and escape it leaving the Earth’s surface behind. Yes if you push hard enough, God will let you slip from his grasp. But don’t worry – whether you believe in him or not – God loves all his children and won’t turn you loose and let you drift away unless you make a very concerted effort to do so. I for one have a feeling that if I was a proportional size standing on the surface of a nucleus of an atom and I pushed with a proportional effort against my restraints, God would loosen his grip just the same and I would leave that atom to go floating off into the nearly infinitely empty space that exist between the atoms. God’s love is a powerful thing. But he will never use it to make you submit to his will against your own. He will never crush you with it. But he will release you from it if you push against it. But therein lies the void. Without God’s love we are empty pitiful things. Yes, I know if I were able to stand on the surface of say Jupiter, I would be crushed down flat by the tremendous force of gravity there. But that’s because I’m not of the right proportion to stand freely on such a surface.

  Love between two people is a powerful thing as well. It pulls them together and makes them one. The love between a man and a woman or the love between a parent and their children can be oh so fulfilling and such a blessed thing. I love my children always - no matter what and whether they believe it or not. I have been lucky enough to have loved a couple of women with all my heart and soul. But I lost each of them in their turn. And after suffering such a great loss, some of that emptiness again plagued my soul. Since then, that void has been filled with a different love. The love of God. I have a new woman in my life that makes me happy and fills that need again that we all share for human companionship. Now, however, I take great comfort in knowing that I will never experience that feeling of a great empty void again. God’s love will always be there filling that hole and keeping me grounded.

  So which would you prefer to imagine pulls you towards the center of the Earth – an invisible, unexplained force – or God’s love? You can call it the “weak” force of gravity if you want to. But as for me, I prefer to think of it as God’s Strong Love for all his children that keeps our feet planted firmly on the ground. 

Think we know what gravity really is? Go to this link and think again:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophysics/question232.htm