Living The Absence of God

The love of God, taken to its highest form, is no different than atheism. This is to live without consolation of your eventual death, without the feeling of divine warmth guiding your hand, without an affirming presence that tells you in your darkest moments that "you are not alone".

It sounds bleak, doesn't it?

Perhaps the greatest quote of this experience, although much more assured, is this:

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Julian of Norwich

There is some level of natural order to this world. Corrupt politicians ruin lives, and they eventually get overthrown or their kingdom crumbles. Genocide and joy coexist on this same planet at the very same moment. People die, children are born. The same struggles and hopeful stories repeat just with slight variations. The controller of the human condition is time.

This is a modern way to interpret Julian of Norwich's quote.

If to love God is to love all He is and not what he does, how are we supposed to live? We must first understand what all He is.

If we are not Gnostic, the first thing that comes to mind is that God is love.

Love in the non-relational sense, that type of love which can be commonly attributed as grace. It is to see the painful wounds that drive your enemy's attacks against yourself and understand them, even if it contorts your insides under a confused daze. God is incapable of the simple, relational love which we naturally crave. If the highest love is freeing, the only way God could exist is through absence.

If we accept the premise that God knows the true nature of reality in totality, God is truth.

Truth in the unfiltered sense, that type of drive to see things as they really are and to understand the root of systemic pains. To live with an orientation towards truth is different for every person. Both the scientist studying genomics and the artist painting transcendent portraits are fundamentally aligned. In this sense, both science and art are the same discovery of something higher. This is why they can both feel the same. If God is truth, the pursuit of truth is the pursuit of God.

This is a vocation for both theists and atheists.

How painful it is to love a God who only exists in absence. But even if it tears me apart, I can't imagine a life without striving towards a pure love for God.