The Practice of the Love of God 374

Dare to love God! Dare to practice that love everywhere in God’s family, seeing the divine likeness in everyone, mixture of earth and heaven though we be! This challenge was raised by Quaker economist and peace activist Kenneth Boulding some fifty years ago and is no less alive and provocative today. The prolific writer and poet tells us that we are born to love, that we are living parts of a living whole, and that there are no boundaries in God’s whole Kingdom. To Kenneth Boulding, it was “a strange heresy” to treat the realm of emotion as secondary to the intellectual. Rather, he urges us to explore love unlimited by time or place, love in out families, with our neighbors, and in our meetings and churches, all possible through our love for God. The author concludes with his vision for the world and his assurance that there is no room for despair, that God is always redeeming the world, that from the depths of misery there will be “a reawakening of divine love, a new springtime to the weary earth.”