Am I Receiving Love?

Yet one question remains.

If the purpose of my spiritual practice is to receive divine love, how can I know whether I am receiving it?

This may be the most difficult question of all.

In ordinary life, receiving is associated with something identifiable.

Someone gives us a gift. We receive it.

Someone embraces us. We feel it.

Someone speaks to us. We hear them.

There is an exchange that we can recognize.

But what does it mean to receive love from a God who is not a physical object within our universe?

Should I expect warmth?

Peace?

Joy?

A sensation of light?

A feeling of unity?

Perhaps such experiences can accompany prayer. But they can also arise through entirely natural psychological and physiological processes.

Therefore, I cannot honestly treat them as conclusive evidence of divine contact.

Nor can I assume that their absence means God is absent.

This distinction is not new.

For centuries, contemplatives have described periods in which their devotion continued despite an inability to experience God’s presence.

Mother Teresa’s private letters revealed prolonged spiritual darkness.

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux described losing the emotional certainty that had previously supported her faith.

And the anonymous author of the medieval Christian text The Cloud of Unknowing wrote that God may be loved even when He cannot be grasped through thought.

These experiences challenge a comforting assumption.

We often believe that receiving divine love must mean feeling loved.

But what if the two are different?

What if the ability to recognize an experience is not the same as the reality of the relationship we believe it represents?

I cannot answer that question with certainty.

But I can make a practical distinction.

There is a difference between receiving and being receptive.

Receiving describes something that occurs.

Being receptive describes an orientation that I can consciously maintain.

I may not know whether divine love is reaching me.

But I can choose not to close myself to it.

I can choose to remain available.

And perhaps, for now, that is enough.