The angel that presided o'er my birth
Said; "Little creature, form'd of joy and mirth,
Go, love without the help of anything on earth"
William Blake
Thus, many educated
Christian folks who would never address God as “Father” because it is such a
gross anthropomorphism, swallow eagerly the notion of “preferential love” for God, as if there were “someone” out there to
be preferred to someone or something else, as if God could be an object of one's love.
A similar fallacy
is the idea that we must “love our neighbors for God’s sake”. God is one thing,
and your neighbor is quite another, and you only love them bastards because God “says”
you must, or because you find in them some resemblance with a desired object which you call God. Depressing picture...
Of course you actually
are not able to love at all, unless God's very love for His creation permeates and informs your
attitude. But then you will find yourself loving creatures for their own sake -- on God's behalf, so to speak, representing Him as He dwells in you, with His own abundant and overflowing and boundless care. And if you let this overflowing happen, however incomplete and flawed this may be -- lo, here you are loving God for His own sake: not as a desired object, but as Real Presence in those and that which you love.
As Chalcedonian definition holds
it, in Christ the Two Natures are joined “unconfusedly, unchangeably,
indivisibly, inseparably”. It is technically impossible to divorce the love of God from the love of His creation: whoever sees Christ, sees the Father.
