Why Self-Focused Love Leaves Us Empty (and What Expansive Love Offers Instead)

Blog by Gem Fadling

In Anneke Kaai and Eugene Peterson’s book titled In a Word, Peterson writes of the vastness of love:

“I say ‘love’ but what I mean is ‘I want…I desire…I need…’ Even as I say it, I know that it is not love. It is all me-directed. It is all self. The largeness of love is reduced to the mouse hole of the ego. The fire of love is smothered under blankets of self-preoccupation. How do I recover its glory, its splendor, its energy?”[i]

The phrase “mouse hole of the ego” struck me deeply. After reading this, I imagined a tiny arched mouse hole, like the ones from the old Tom & Jerry cartoons. A small, dark opening in the baseboard of a home. It felt cramped and hidden, a place of fear and scurrying rather than freedom.

My mind then stretched outward from that mouse hole into the room, outside the house, and out into the world, expanding ever further into the universe, beyond what I could see, a vastness I could not comprehend. In comparison to the universe, a mouse hole is a fairly small thing, wouldn’t you say? And yet how easily I reduce love to the smallness of my ego.

Peterson is such a master with words, so perfectly describing the smallness of what I perceive to be love when it is filtered through my own wants. My ego is so good at trying to make itself bigger. Thomas Merton describes the ego as not being real, as having to wrap itself up, to clothe itself so it feels real. The ego likes to keep busy, to compare, and to defend itself.

My ego desires to be center stage, believing it has to be bigger, better, and bolder than anyone else. But this takes so much energy, and at this point in my life, I’m exhausted in the trying.

I love the freedom of expanding my vision of God to the vastness that is beyond comprehension. God’s enormity reminds me that there is nowhere God isn’t—or, as I like to say, that God is not elsewhere. This vastness does not diminish intimacy, it deepens it. It grants me the perspective I so desperately need.

Some might complain that if God is so big, then why do bad things happen? That is an unanswerable question. I will simply testify that in my moments of deepest pain and suffering, that is when I have felt the reality of God’s presence most profoundly. Corrie Ten Boom, someone who endured profound suffering, would agree: God is with us in the darkest places, not removed from them.

God is never elsewhere.

This means that God’s love is never elsewhere. God can only love because that is how God self-defines (1 John 4:8). Love is not something God does occasionally but continuously.

I don’t want to be limited by my ego to a love the size of a mouse hole. I want my heart to be stretched by the vastness of God rather than shrunk by my fears. How about you?

For Reflection: 

• How might I remain more open to the expansiveness of God?
• How can I stay awake to the smallness of my ego without shaming myself?
• What would it look like to expand my thinking, feeling, and believing today?

 (Anneke Kaai and Eugene Peterson. In a Word: The Image and Language of Faith.  Paraclete Press, 2003, p. 9.)