February 7, 2025

Today is the seventh and last of our daily reflections for Interfaith Harmony Week. (If you missed any of the other days, you can find them in the blog section of our website, interfaithpeaceproject.org .) The Interfaith Peace Project has been pleased to offer you these reflections for each day of Interfaith Harmony Week, February 1-7, 2025.

Thomas P. Bonacci, C.P
[email protected]
925-787-9279

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LOVE OF GOD
INTERFAITH HARMONY WEEK
Day 7
by Thomas P. Bonacci, C.P.

Adobe Stock 793502889 By Lila Patel

⁷Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
⁸ If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
⁹ If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
¹⁰ even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
Psalm 139: 7-10

Wisdom

“God is not the monopoly of any human tradition … Nor is God the “object” of any kind of thought. A discourse desiring to imprison God in any kind of ideology would be sectarian.

In other words, Christians are able to speak in the name of Christ, Buddhists can invoke Buddha, Marxists Marx, democrats Justice and Liberty, philosophers Truth, scientists Exactitude, Muslims the message of Muhammad. And each of these human groups can believe itself the interpreter of a conviction that comes from God or from reality itself, whether we call it faith, evidence, reason, common sense, or anything else. But if the name of God is to play a part in all that, it ought to be as a symbol of another order, a symbol that serves to uproot the absolutism of every human activity, a symbol that expresses the contingency of all human enterprises, thus a symbol that makes impossible every totalitarianism of whatever type there may be. “Not only is God not exterior to the world but (God) is absolutely interior to it,” Zubiri said. So interior to the world is God that we cannot separate God from the world metaphysically, nor divide God politically, nor compartmentalize God socially.“

Raimon Panikkar
The Experience of God:
Icons of the Mystery
Kindle Edition Locations 75-78

Reflection

If I do not love God more, I might not love anyone at all. I do not love God as if God was an object. “God”, for many, is a word signifying a greater perspective, a Higher Power, a deeper awareness, or the interior consciousness or awareness.

God has many images and likenesses. God is beyond our ability to comprehend even as we experience a depth of meaning, an ultimate purpose, and a nagging presence urging us to do and be better people.

Voltaire said, “To see another person is to see the face of God.” The New Testament powerfully teaches, “They who say they love God whom they do not see but hate their neighbor who they do see are liars.”

God is ultimately that Elusive Presence urging us on beyond the limits of our fears and failures. Something greater than ourselves is always with us and loves us more than we might love ourselves or one another. 

Response

1.     Look deep into the eyes of another and savor the God who looks at you with love.

2.     Praise God by being true to your deepest self.

3.     Be mindful – If you love God, you strive to love who and what God loves.

4.     See yourself as God’s love in the world.