Our Love Affair With God

We don’t realize that we have a great need
to feel loved by God, and to love Him.
This need is sublimated in romantic love
which is a form of idolatry.

Our Love Affair with God 
by Henry Makow PhD
(from Dec 31, 2014, 2009)

While making a spaghetti sauce, I put on a collection of old Paul Anka hits.

Listening to the lyrics, it struck me: If you imagine the love object is God, instead of some empty-headed girl with regular features, there’s little difference between popular love songs and religious hymns, prayers and chants.

We are all pilgrims and God (Love) is our Mecca.

I don’t have to tell you that 97 per cent of all popular songs are love songs. A visitor from another planet would conclude that our religion is romantic love.

But instead of recognizing the real object of our desire, we have fixated on the opposite sex, whom we mystify and idealize to reflect our true sublimated desire.

I am not a Jungian, but I agree with Carl Jung’s statement: “If you take away God, man will invent a thousand false ones.”

They have taken away God. You can’t mention the word in polite company. As if, given the magnificence of the universe and the complexity of the natural world, the concept of a Creator and a Design is so outlandish that it must be banned.

The people who want to replace God (with themselves) are responsible for our inability to mention or imagine God when it is so simple.

God is synonymous with our spiritual ideals and desires: truth, beauty, love, peace, bliss, justice and harmony.  So don’t blame God for letting bad things happen to good people. Bad people are responsible, the same people who abolished God.

We are God’s agents. If we don’t bring about his Kingdom, it won’t happen. Eventually, we’ll all become extinct.

GETTING BACK TO LOVE SONGS
 

Next time you hear a love song, imagine it’s about God. You will be surprised how well it fits.

“I love you with all my heart, we’ll never part, please stay with me…(God).”

“I’m so lonely; I’m so blue, now that you’re gone.”

These lyrics remind me of Christian, Muslim and Hindu mystics pining away for Divine Grace. 

We’re religious zealots, just like them. All that’s missing are the white robes. We don’t pray five times a day. We listen to these prayers 50-100 times a day.

But we’ve taken a wrong turn. Instead of recognizing the true object of our desire, we have glommed on to the opposite sex. We are looking for a person to play the role of God.

Frankly, we’ve been misdirected. (Think who runs the music and movie business.)  And, of course, lust is a confounding factor …

CONCLUSION

If we could just begin with the knowledge that God loves us, then we wouldn’t have this desperate misguided need “for love” expressed in love songs.