If God Is Love and God Is Nothing, Why Do We Run?

You have probably heard both of these claims about God, though rarely in the same breath. The first says God is love. The second says God is nothing at all.

They sound like they belong to different religions, and for a long time I kept them in separate drawers. The first is from scripture, and I grew up with it: God is love. The second comes from the mystics, and from the road I took through physics and philosophy: God, the absolute, the ground of everything, is nothing. Not a thing among things. No edges, no form, no properties you could point at.

Then one day the two snapped together into a kind of equation, and what fell out of it was uncomfortable. It concerned the part of each of us that is always asking for more love, and why that same part might be the reason love feels so hard to receive.

I'll work through that equation one step at a time, then ask the question it raised for me: if love is the nature of reality, why do we seem to run from it?

"God is Love. God is Nothing. Ego is something. Ego is love/hate. So the less you are, the more your capacity for Love?"

The Equation

Let me unpack that, because it is compressed.

If the ultimate reality is both love and nothing, then love and nothingness are somehow the same thing seen from two sides. Nothing, here, does not mean absence. It means no boundaries, nothing held back, nothing excluded. And that is a fair description of unconditional love: love without conditions, without edges, without exceptions.

The ego, on the other hand, is something. It is a boundary: this is me, that is not me. And anything with a boundary has a two-sided relationship with the world. It loves what supports it and resents what threatens it. Love and hate come as a pair.

So the logic runs: the more "something" you are, the more edges you have, and the less room there is for boundless love. The less you are, the more of it fits.

What We Actually Want

This helped me with a question that had nagged me about human desire.

Everyone wants to be loved unconditionally, not for our looks, money, success or usefulness, but for ourselves. Yet when you look at it closely, it is a strange wish. Strip away every condition and what is left to love?

What is left seems to be the same in all of us. Whatever it is that wants to be loved "despite" being broke, or old, or unwell, or difficult, it does not seem to change as those conditions change. I compared it to a screen, the one thing that stays constant while the pictures on it shift.

So perhaps that is what we are really asking for. Not love for the pictures, but love for the screen. And if there is ultimately only one screen behind all the pictures, then the hunger for unconditional love is the One wanting to recognize itself.

The Uncomfortable Turn

This is the thought that unsettled me.

If love is the nature of reality, infinite and unconditional, why does experiencing it feel so rare? Why do we spend our lives hunting for scraps of it in other people?

"Is ego the only escape from the crushing overwhelmingness of infinite love"

I wonder if we have had it backwards. We tend to think of the ego as what blocks us from love, the selfishness we need to overcome. But what if it is also a shelter? Infinite love, without limits, could be overwhelming for a finite creature. Perhaps the ego works like a dimmer switch, turning the brightness down to a level a small life can survive.

In Burnt Norton, T. S. Eliot wrote that "human kind / Cannot bear very much reality." I have come to suspect the same might be true of love.

Why Love Feels Like Dying

That would explain something that shows up in almost every love story worth telling.

Real love always costs the self something. Falling in love feels like losing control. Parents describe their love for their children as having their heart walk around outside their body. The deepest acts of love in the Christian story involve giving up the self entirely.

From this angle, that is not a coincidence. Every time the boundary of the ego softens, more love gets in. And every time more love gets in, the ego feels it as a kind of death, because in a small way it is.

That is why I think love and ego are often in a tug of war. The ego wants love, desperately, but it wants a version of love that keeps the ego intact. Boundless love asks for the one thing the ego cannot give: less of itself.

What This Asks of Us

I don't think the answer is to try to obliterate the ego. That rarely works, and it can become its own kind of ego project. And if the ego really is a shelter, perhaps it is there for good reasons.

What has helped me is simpler. Noticing, in small moments, when I am holding something back. When I want to be right more than I want to be close. When I want love on my terms. Each of those is a small "something" standing in the way.

Sometimes, just noticing is enough for it to step aside.

Less of Me

Jesus says that whoever will lose his life for his sake shall find it (Matthew 16:25). I used to hear that as a demand, a price to be paid. Now I hear it more as a description of how love works.

If God is love, and God is nothing, then love is not something we have to manufacture. It is what is left when we get out of the way.

So the question I am left with is not how to get more love. It is how much of ourselves we are willing to set down to let it in.