Intimacy with God and Borderless Love

Theologian Sallie McFague (1933–2019) centers compassionate change in a passionate love for God:  

At the center of Jesus’ message as prophet and wisdom teacher is the vision of a world as an egalitarian community of beings, not a hierarchy of individuals. His parables and aphorisms disorient our conventional expectations and suggest a way of being in the world where all are valued, especially the vulnerable and outcast. He shows us how to live this message by doing so himself: his unsettling parables and sayings are embodied in his own practices of living among the marginalized and siding with those considered inferior by conventional standards. He tells us also when and where to do it: now and here.…  

This evangelism or good news, however, is not offered as an imperative or as an accomplished fact, but rather as an invitation: it is … inviting us to live differently. It does not appear to be principally a matter of the intellect or the will, but of the heart. The alternative to the conventional hierarchical, dualistic paradigm of life is, according to Jesus, the way of death to the old life and rebirth to the new. At the center of this new life is love to God and others: not just a moderate or “sensible” love, but God-intoxication and compassion for others that knows no limits.…  

Those who have followed Jesus most radically, regardless of their other errors and failings—people like Paul, Augustine, Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, John Woolman, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Dorothy Day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, and many others less well known—passionately loved both God and the world (and everything in it).… These people seem to know no limits, either in their outrageous intimacy with God nor with their borderless love for all living things. [1]   

[1] Sallie McFague, Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril (Fortress Press, 2001), 175, 176.