The great revelation God has made to the human race is: God IS love. Christianity maintains that Jesus Christ is God’s perfect revelation. Jesus is the fulfiller of that revelation of God’s love as active, immanently present to His children in communion through the self-emptying love unto the death of His only begotten Son. So marked, indeed, has been God’s love for the world that He gave His only begotten Son: everyone who believes in Him is not to perish, but to have eternal life (John 3: 16-17).

Christianity, especially as developed in the West, has, in contrast to how it developed in the East, all too often accentuated the intellectual grasp of truth revealed by God through His Church and failed to see faith in Jesus Christ as a response we are to make to His gift of Himself to us. Understanding with our minds that God is love, as shown by Christ’s dying on the cross for us, we have been exhorted by our spiritual fathers and our teachers to love others in the same sort of selfless way.

We have not heard enough of what the early Church Fathers – theologians who prayed and experienced Scripture – continually taught of the inner spiritual transformation that was experienced in prayer through the power of the Holy Spirit. The middle stage between God’s love for us and our going out in acts of service toward others has been slighted in our teaching and preaching.

Unlike the Eastern Fathers of the Church, it seems like the Church has feared to preach   another knowledge, one that is experiential, mystical and unifying of ourselves with God in a community of love – love that differentiates as it unites. Jesus, as the perfect image of the Father’s love for us, became human in order that by His death and resurrection and through His outpouring of the Holy Spirit, we all might come to personally know God!