to love one another
reunitingly with the love wherewith God loved us.

In order for us to participate in the love of God which is at work in
the world, we need to understand ourselves and our own creaturely
problems in relation to love. Too much Christian thought about love and
its work is abstract rather than a reckoning with the complications of
human existence. In order to avoid this danger, let us turn to a
consideration of what is involved in recovering our freedom to love.

_Recovering Our Freedom to Love_

Because we are created in the image of God, our deepest need is to be
loved. This need is fundamental and has both human and divine roots. The
baby comes into being as a result of being loved. We take him in our
arms, care for him, call him by name, and reveal to him the love that we
have for him. Thus he experiences love. These experiences of love
stimulate, in turn, his love, which is the completion of his need of
love. His response to being loved is to love, and this response is not
long in coming. We see it in his smiles, in his cooing, when he pats his
mother's cheek, when he puts his little arms around her neck, and later
when he begins to toddle and bring his gifts to her. In many ways the
individual begins to show that he has been loved by revealing his
growing power to love.

Our day, however, seems to be one in which people are more conscious of
their need to be loved than of their need to love, with the result that
everyone is running around looking for love. But we do not find love by
looking for it; we find it by giving it. And when we find love by
loving, we find God. Our Lord gave us His love generously, not in order
that we might be loved, but that we might be freed to love one another.
"You received without pay, give without pay."[14] He calls us from our
childish preoccupations with security to the appropriate adult
occupations of the mature Christian. He calls us away from our suckling
tendencies to our responsibility to feed others, from receiving to
giving. If someone came to me and asked, "How can I find God?" I would
answer, "Go find someone to love and you'll find Him."

Unless the searcher was love-deprived and in need of reassurance, I
would not begin by figuratively putting my arm around him and cherishing
him. There are situations where this is necessary. People can be so
broken and so hurt that they cannot love, and they need to be cherished
and reassured until they can. One