Do You See God As You See A Cow?

 

Some people want to see God with their eyes as they see a cow, and to love Him as they love their cow—for the milk and cheese and profit it brings them. This is how it is with people who love God for the sake of outward wealth or inward comfort. They do not rightly love God, when they love Him for their own advantage. Indeed, I tell you the truth, any object you have in your mind, however good, will be a barrier  between you and the inmost Truth.                 ---Eckhart

My favorite mystic, Meister Eckhart, speaks truth in plain words. This quote strikes me as  important  to consider. 

Loving God, or another person, for what they can give us is more a transactional kind of thing than love. It's not that transactions are wrong or bad, it's that, when they are mislabeled as love, it does a great disservice to love and to our ability to understand our relationship to God and to other people, as well as to ourselves.

I recently wrote about love and all the various words you could hang on it to understand it more deeply. I urge you to reread that part. But mainly today I just like us to consider shifting out of transactional attachments and calling them love, to be honest with ourselves and endeavor to move our lives to unconditional love, which is what we are really called to do.