A love to come home to

I like to think that I "got" God first, and then translated the experience into human love. This undeniably happened and continues to happen. Simply by tuning in to God, I am sometimes able to bring about a fair bit of love around me.

Still, if I'm being really honest. I didn't get God first. God built on existing experiences of human love and magnified them a thousand times. But qualitatively speaking it was people who first showed me love, and then God entered the picture.

Could it be that God piggybacks on whatever imperfect human love there is and that God is sometimes even dependent on it, not wanting human love and divine love to be separate things but letting them be forever tangled? Loving us first through people and being loved first through people.

It's a process really. If someone loves me really well, I start to think that God probably loves me like that. While if I grasp something about the way God loves me, I'll try the same with people, as I should.

I'm just thinking aloud here, but the challenge this raises is that a lot of people do not have a love they can come home to. Which render parables such as the prodigal son and the lost sheep pretty useless in my opinion.

So okay then, if the person I'm with has no concept of love to come home to, then where do I start?

What were the authors of the Gospel thinking? Did they mean that people should just get back to Judaism, knowing that's where their interlocutors came from? Well good luck with that when your own interlocutor has no concept of God.

Do I narrate it from scratch as in: "you really do have a love to come home to, you just don't know about it". Maybe... but if that's just an intellectual explanation, it will remain meaningless. As Pascal has it, nobody can look for something they haven't already found.

So my approach will be to offer imperfect love, aiming to be a Bishop Myriel of sorts and seing how it goes. And by this I don't mean anything overly saintly and unsustainable. I'll just be real. This requires me to believe that God is fond of me, Dany, and does not require me to have a complete instantaneous personality transplant and be the mega saint that I am not.

God will build on what I am, and on what what you are, and maybe even piggyback on our imperfect love. God will sometimes shine through our own lives, if that's what we earnestly desire and humbly work towards.