THE WRONG WORD

I am rereading The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling by an anonymous Christian writer of the 14^th Century.  The books are a spiritual guide on contemplative prayer.   

Their underlying message is that the only way to truly “know” God is to give up all preconceived notions or “knowledge” about God, surrendering, instead, to what the author calls “unknowingness.”  A glimpse of the true nature of God will then arise.  A similar idea is in Vedanta.

When I first read these books five years ago, I was inspired greatly, and am feeling so again today.  But one aspect of them bothers me.  They use the word “love” a lot, regarding both God’s relationship to us and our relationship to him.

Love is a loaded term, with much baggage, and it means different things to different people.  Thus, when it is used to describe our relationship with the divine, it is confusing, misleading, because it feels like the wrong word.  We think of it as ordinary, everyday love.

But love on this level defies definition, in the same way that God himself cannot be defined.  In place of “love,” it seems to me better to say that it is something like love?  God’s love for us and our love for God resembles love, but it is not love.