Why we do not love God: overcoming spiritual barriers
The Gospel commandment to love God remains unattainable for many Christians. Let's examine the main reasons for our spiritual alienation.
The Gospel reading about the main commandment repeatedly brings us back to the central issue of our lives – the loveless solitude of the soul, which cannot love God, people, the surrounding world, or even itself. And there are reasons for this.
Our complaints against God and the way to overcome them
Most of us distance ourselves from God due to fear of suffering or because of real experiences of it. It is difficult for a person to come to terms with an "unjust God" who "sends" so much pain and suffering to innocent children, animals, and the entire world.
The so-called eternal questions, which have no answers and require only faith and trust from us, do not allow a person to love God as He is rather than as we want Him to be.
Chronic injustice, a vast number of broken destinies and tragedies – all these are walls separating the human soul from God. We also cannot love God, who seems to us not as the Father but as a ruthless judge, ready to punish for the slightest offense, and for greater ones – to send to hell for eternal torment. By default, a person sees Godas they imagine Him, based on false conclusions of logic and reason.
The Book of Job shows us how to overcome this temptation. We will not get answers to all questions, but we can start an honest dialogue with God. Not a formal prayer rule, but a dialogue where we can express all our doubts, grievances, and misunderstandings.
We should not be afraid to ask God "improper" questions, to express our emotions and feelings about what troubles our soul.
God has many ways to give us an answer. The worst thing is if we carry resentment towards Him, turning away and ceasing all communication.
We should not forget that our logic and so-called common sense are the result of the fall, when we lost the ability to directly see God and speak with Him. We need to be able to acknowledge the limitations of our understanding of God's Providence. Humility and humbleness before the incomprehensible destinies of the world and man are not weakness, but true strength, which expands the horizons of our existence in this perishable world. It is what allows us to "forgive God" and accept everything that happens from His hands.
Unfortunately, many of us lack the experience of personal communication with God. All our faith is at the level of theory and fidelity to tradition, which, without personal experience, has little value.
Love for God, like love for anyone, requires the practice of personal communication. But unlike communication with a person, which occurs "outside" our personality, communication with God needs to be developed within ourselves, in the depths of our spiritual heart, where we, unfortunately, rarely look.
Moreover, the practice of good deeds helps in developing love for God. It has long been noted that through acts of mercy, sacrificial love for one's neighbor, and a careful, loving attitude towards the surrounding world, the inner self begins to clear up, their world becomes brighter. They more clearly see the mysterious outlines of the personality of the Heavenly Father, which were previously hidden from them in the darkness of ignorance and prejudice.
Other reasons for alienation from God are pride and a sense of self-sufficiency. The higher the level of material life and the better the social protection, the faster people lose faith. What an ordinary person asks of God is successfully performed by social services. They simply have no need to go to church and ask the Heavenly Father for anything. The philosophical question of the meaning of life is not within their circle of interests. Life flows systematically, calmly, abundantly, and sufficiently.
In the modern world, where materialism and rationalism prevail, people do not "bother" with abstract questions about the meaning of their existence. More than a meaningless life, they fear a power outage or the absence of drinking water in the tap.
False sense of unworthiness and misunderstanding of holiness
Another extreme, which is much closer to us, is a false sense of one's own unworthiness. Reading the lives of the saints, an Orthodox Christian has no choice but to admit that their sins are so great, and their life so far from holiness, that they have no chance of hoping for God's love and forgiveness.
A false impression is created that God has "favorites" – saints and righteous ones who are under His special protection, to whom He gives His grace and strength, and they succeed in spiritual life. And all the rest are stepchildren, who are not worthy of this and to whom He is completely indifferent.
The experience of everyday life seems to confirm this thesis. Reading the lives, you see that the saints prayed to God and He answered them, visibly participated in their lives. And here you go to church for years, try to pray, repent, and partake – and not a sound from above, not the slightest help or revelation. And sometimes, in response to the question of why this is so, a priest will say that it’s because “you don’t pray well,” or “you don’t live as the saints lived,” and so on. That is, we again receive confirmation that we are not interesting to God. Although it is precisely to those children who are doing worse that a mother comes to help. High achievers don’t need it – they’ll manage just fine without it, but for those barely passing or failing, it would be very helpful. Yet years go by, and it still doesn’t come. The obvious conclusion is: God doesn’t love us.
The issue is not that God does not answer us. The excessive desire to embellish the lives of the saints and exaggerate the significance of the miraculous and supernatural in their lives has led to the ordinary person feeling like they belong to a caste of the rejected, not the chosen like the saints. Although it is the saints who have experienced to a much greater extent in their lives both the feeling of being abandoned by God and complete abandonment by Him, and all that we experience to a much lesser extent. God also does not appear to them at the first prayerful call. Many years of titanic labor and tears were needed to produce the first sprouts of the fruits of grace.
We think that God loves us only "for something". Being selfish ourselves, we try to project our evaluative judgments onto God.
It is difficult for us to imagine that God can love us just like that, for nothing – simply because He Himself is Love, and everything He does, He does only out of love and for the sake of love.
The labors and feats of the saints are not things they did to appease God or to attract His attention in order to earn His love. They are a gift of their own love for God. As long as we try to live by the commandments merely to “please God”, it’s unlikely that we will escape the trap of legalistic or servile mentality. But when we begin to do it out of love and for the sake of love, then perhaps we will understand the true essence and core of spiritual life.
Ultimately, love for God is a journey into the unknown.
It is the ability to build a relationship with Him based on mercy, not merits. This journey requires us to free ourselves from the imposed legalistic psychology and false prejudices acquired as a result of improper spiritual upbringing. It takes a lot of patience, humility, and openness of heart for this journey to end with the great meeting of the Loving and the beloved, the Father with the son or daughter. Then we will have no questions to God, all grievances and misunderstandings will disappear. And now we need to accept our fate and God's will as a given and live by faith and love for Him.
