Love Is the Reason

This book begins with an experience of love that seemed to the author both deeply personal and broadly universal. He indicates he was prone to melancholy and negative and overly-critical thinking, but this experience of total love snapped him right out of that. He uses nature imagery, romantic imagery and spiritual imagery to describe the experience, and then shows throughout the book how these are all integrated and held together by the experience itself. As the book goes on, there is reflection on the experience and what ramifications it has for his philosophy of life, of relationship, and of God. The experience has revealed something new about God, about relationship, and about himself. There are allusions to Bible passages but these are interpreted in a new way: according to this experience of love. The passages about love in "the Scriptures" now are seen in a new, vital, vivid way. The introduction states that the book presents an argument for spirituality based on the idea that "God is love." For the author, this means that God's creation - we ourselves - must also be love, because we were created in the image and likeness of God. Thus we are only natural, only truly ourselves when we are loving. And all this love is meant for our happiness - simply because God is love and cares for us.