I’ve learned to banish the hate, but I’m slow to learn real love

I had a realization Wednesday night that seems profound, but I can’t think of any way to say it that won’t make me sound like an idiot or a fool. Maybe both.

Becoming the man I need to be — especially in the spiritual sense — is about addition, not subtraction.

If I visualize my life as a complex object or machine or organism, I have always seen myself as defective. I haven’t been fully conscious of this. As I’ve tried sincerely to improve myself and become who God wanted me to be, I’ve seen it as a matter of removing defective parts.

Everything about what I learned as a child — both at home and at church — oriented me toward this unconscious model.

At home, I constantly heard everything that was wrong with me. Everything that I needed to stop doing. At church, I learned all the ways that sin made us unacceptable to God. The lessons I learned from these two centers of my development taught me that I could be acceptable to God and to my family by closely following a set of rules.

I internalized those rules that I needed to follow, both from my family and from my church. Those rules became part of my core operating assumptions about life. Compared to most people I knew, I was very good at obeying all of those rules to the letter.

But what I overlooked was something much more profound.

As I followed all of the rules I was taught — and became closer and closer to being what everyone else seemed to call “good,” I wasn’t adequately replacing the “defective parts.”

I was removing the things I could call sin or bad behavior, but I wasn’t replacing what I removed with a truly changed heart.

I didn’t truly know how to love. Not God. Not others. Not even myself.

I’ve slowly been moving in this direction for a long time.

I’ve written over and over in the last few years — especially this last year — about the crucial importance of love. I’ve been struggling to come to grips with how much I’ve needed to change myself.

I’m not going to try to distinguish between different types of love here, because I have a vague feeling that what I’m saying applies to all of them — spiritual love, romantic love, friendship, family love, self-love.

In some ways, I’ve unintentionally treated “loving others” as the same as “not hating them.”

I’ve been feeling more deeply lately, but in ways I’ve been able to experience more than logically explain.

It’s frustrated me that I haven’t been able to come up with words to explain — in ideas or concepts — what I was experiencing inside. I’ve always been such a rational person that this has been profoundly disturbing.

Wednesday night, I suddenly realized the reason for this. I’ve been struggling to explain a love that I was feeling — actually experiencing rather than merely understanding — that had always been more of a rational understanding or belief in the past.

In the words of 19th-century minister Charles Finney, I was feeling “waves and waves of liquid love.” And that was so profound that it couldn’t be put into rational thoughts or ideas.

As I was driving Wednesday night, I was praying and meditating on the power of gratitude. As I felt profound thanks to God — real, genuine gratitude — I was suddenly overwhelmed by something I couldn’t explain. I couldn’t put this thing I was feeling into words.

The more I thought about this, the more I realized that what I was experiencing was completely in my heart or spirit — not in my head.

All of a sudden, the metaphor with which I started came to me. I suddenly realized that my lifelong behavior had been subtraction of what I didn’t think should be in my life. What I was experiencing was the addition of something that came completely from outside of myself.

You see, I’m not naturally capable of divine love of that sort. In my flesh, the best I’m capable of is keeping my worst instincts from controlling my actions. I’m sometimes capable of stifling my most unloving thoughts and feelings.

But I realized that what I was feeling was the culmination of something that’s been growing in me for years now. I was experiencing a love from outside of myself — something that made sense only in terms of Finney’s description.

And I didn’t want to turn away from the beauty of that experience. I didn’t want to turn my eyes back to the ugliness of the human world all around me — because I have a long habit of allowing that ugly culture to dominate my thoughts.

Nothing I’m saying here is original or profound. Every word of it should be foundational to the spiritual life of someone who follows someone whose most important commands were about loving God and loving others.

But I realize that I’ve seen only bits and pieces of this love before. I realize that I haven’t quite let myself understand how deep it can go — and how profoundly it can change me.

In spiritual terms, this seems as though it should be a kindergarten-level concept to understand. And it is. But I’m often slow to comprehend the truth.

So, yes, maybe I’m an idiot. Maybe I’m a fool.

But I’m feeling waves and waves of liquid love tonight. And I’m grateful for it.