The Vastness of God’s Love is Deliciously Refreshing

Today’s post is from Bondings 2.0 contributor M. Hakes (they/them), whose bio and previous posts can be found here.

Today’s liturgical readings for the 23rd Sunday of Ordinary Time can be found here.

“If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.” (Psalm 95:8)

While the rest of the United States has been melting in the historic heat of this summer, our weather in Duluth (nicknamed “the air conditioned city”) has been tempered, as it is each summer, by the cool–oftentimes, icy–waters of Lake Superior. One of my favorite things to do in the summer, especially on the rare “hot” day is to go for a swim. It is hard to accurately express how deliciously refreshing it is to be enveloped by Mother Superior’s waves on an eighty-something degree day and to swim out into her seemingly endless depths.

Lake Superior, or gichigami (the name for this body of water in anishinaabemowin, the Ojibwe language), spans 31,700 square miles, approximately the same surface area as the country of Austria. It holds about 10% of the world’s freshwater. It takes 551 billion gallons of water to raise the water level of the Lake by one inch. If the Lake were emptied, the water would cover the entire landmass of North and South America in approximately 12 inches of water. These and other facts about Lake Superior help us to wrap our brains around the incomprehensible greatness of this Lake, but this attempt at intellectual understanding is incomparable to being tossed around by Superior’s swells on a sun soaked summer day. I will never be able to fully grasp how big Lake Superior is, but I do know what it’s like to be held in her vastness.

I wonder how many Lake Superiors could be filled with the gallons of ink that have been spilled through the centuries attempting to articulate what we “know” about God. Countless thick theological tomes with captivating academic prowess endeavor to describe the God whom the writer of the First Letter of John succinctly names as “Love.” But our God is not one that can be apprehended by mental gymnastics. Rather They are known (and only then in part) through experience. At the heart of the Christian faith is the idea that the infinite and holy mystery of God does not remain forever remote, but draws near to the world. This holy mystery touches us through incarnation and through grace. Our God has embraced our humanity so fully, that They “became flesh and dwelt among us.” To paraphrase theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, our God is Deus humanissimus, the exceedingly human God; a God that is human to the very depths of what it means to be human; a God that is capable of holding all the complexities of what it means to be human within Themself.

I’ve heard homilies on today’s gospel reading that reduce Jesus’ words about forgiveness to a sort of action plan to correct wayward sinners–to bring them back to the fold. As a queer Catholic, I have had countless people attempt to “correct” me. I have been told that my God created identities are sinful and gross. I have been told that my “lifestyle” is an evil choice and that if only I trusted God more, He would take this awful burden away and I would be “normal.” For a long time, I didn’t know what it is like to not feel broken; to know instead at a heart level that I am good, loved, and worthy. Amidst the heat of this hateful rhetoric, God’s uncontainable, unwieldy love has been a cooling balm.

The Way of Jesus doesn’t call us away from our humanity, our God-created identities. Instead it calls us ever deeper into the mystery of what it means to be human. It calls us to courageously embrace all of who we are—the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly—and surrender ourselves fully to God’s incomprehensible, transforming, life-giving love. As Jesuit Father Greg Boyle writes in his book Tattoos on the Heart, “[God] wants to accept all that we are and sees our humanity as the privileged place to encounter this magnanimous love. No part of our hardwiring or our messy selves is to be disparaged. Where we stand, in all our mistakes and imperfection, is holy ground. It is where God has chosen to be intimate with us and not in any way but this.”

God is present where life is lived bravely, eagerly, lovingly, and authentically; even without any explicit reference to religion. We find ourselves in, with, and under the Divine mystery when we accept the silent immensity that surrounds us as something infinitely distant and yet ineffably near, when we receive it as a sheltering nearness and a tender love that carries no reservations, and when we have the courage to accept our own life in all its complexities.

Just as I know that facts about Lake Superior are nothing compared to the experience of swimming in it, I know I will never be able to fully grasp how big God is. But, I do know what it’s like to be held in God’s vastness–and it is deliciously refreshing.

—M. Hakes, New Ways Ministry, September 10, 2023