As I expressed in the last installment of this article, the Eastern Church sees God as preeminently LOVE. This means that God, Who revealed Himself to be a community of Persons (i.e., Father, Son and Holy Spirit) wishes to give Himself to us. Why? Because love is, in essence, the giving of oneself completely to the other. True love is expressed through the gift of self to the beloved. Jesus is God’s gift of Himself to us through the Holy Spirit. We recognize this gift through faith. St. Paul says in his letter to the Romans: The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us. As Irenaeus, a saint from the second century has expressed it, we are touched by the two hands of God which are Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

If Jesus promised, as St. John reports in his gospel, that He and the Father would come and dwell within us, we can experience this living presence by increasing our awareness of God’s presence in our life and world. If Jesus taught, as again reported by St. John, that eternal life is this: to know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent, gain this knowledge by living as Jesus lived. We can gain insight into the chief revelation made through Jesus that the Trinity lives in each and every individual follower of Christ. God became a man so that we might come to understand the meaning of life and, in understanding it, might come to know God. This is an ongoing, life-long process, which, because life is immortal, truly an eternal process.

Christianity was meant by Jesus to be a living experience of abiding in and loved infinitely by our Triune God Who is, in truth, a community of love. The great insight of Christianity is that since God is a community of love, so too must we find God within a community of love which, hopefully, is the Church.