The Reckless Love That Spills Onto the Page

Have you ever watched a child paint? Not the careful, color-by-numbers kind of painting, but the wild, joyful sort where the brush is more an extension of the heart than the hand. Paint splatters on the floor. The colors bleed into one another. The sky might end up green, the grass purple, and somewhere in the middle of the chaos there is a sun with a face and far too many rays. The child does not pause to consider whether this work will hang in galleries. She is not concerned with technique or composition. She paints because something inside her must come out, because she has been loved and seen the world, and now her small heart is overflowing with what it cannot contain.

There is something profoundly holy about that kind of unselfconscious creation. And I have come to believe that this is precisely how God wishes us to live our entire lives before Him.

We live in a world obsessed with refinement. Every sentence we write, every photograph we post, every meal we prepare is curated. We polish. We edit. We measure ourselves against the masters of every craft and find ourselves wanting. And in the spiritual life, this same instinct creeps in. We want our prayer to be eloquent. We want our love for God to be sophisticated, theologically precise, aesthetically pleasing. We want, in short, to give God something worthy of Him.

But what if God has never asked for our refinement? What if He has only ever asked for our recklessness?

 

The God Who Did Not Polish His Love

Consider the cross. Truly consider it. Not the polished gold cross hanging on a chain, not the stained-glass crucifix illuminated by afternoon light, but the actual, historical event of Calvary.

A man stripped naked. Blood running down a wooden beam. The sound of nails being driven through human flesh. Mockery and spittle. The slow, suffocating death of crucifixion, which the Romans designed specifically to be as humiliating and grotesque as possible.

This is how God chose to love us.

Saint Paul understood this when he wrote to the Corinthians: ”For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18). The Greek word translated “foolishness” is mōria, from which we get our word “moron.” The cross is, by every measure of human sophistication, moronic. It is the opposite of refined. It is the opposite of elegant. It is love stripped of all dignity, all self-protection, all reasonableness.

Paul presses the point even further: ”For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Corinthians 1:25).

There is a recklessness at the heart of God that we rarely allow ourselves to face. We prefer a tidy God, a respectable God, a God whose love makes sense within the boundaries of our prudence. But the God who hangs on the cross is not respectable. He is not prudent. He is wildly, extravagantly, almost embarrassingly in love with us.

That is not to say that there is not a place for art, for beauty! It is not to diminish the golden crucifix you might wear. Quite the contrary, if you truly examine beauty in Christian art, what's happening there is the shining forth of Beauty Himself in imagery that is, as it stands alone, anything but.

When Jesus was taken down from the cross, the world saw a weeping mother holding her son. They saw a tragedy.

Michelangelo saw beauty—and in that, created what is probably my favorite sculpture of all time, the Pietà.

This is the profundity of beautiful art, and why the greatest works of art in the West are often those done with deep reverence, with religious devotion. There is a beauty contained, channeled, through subjects that would otherwise seem otherwise. Good art has a way of revealing the beauty of things that are tragic, or even grotesque, by their real-world appearance. Like the depiction of a bloody crucifixion, or a mourning mother holding a broken corpse. Love shines through, and where God's love is, beauty is present in its fullness.

 

The Extravagance of Sacred Love

Think of the woman with the alabaster jar. She broke it open and poured the costly nard over the feet of Jesus, anointing Him with what was likely her life’s savings. The disciples were scandalized. ”Why this waste?” they demanded (Matthew 26:8). It was inefficient. It was excessive. It was not properly accounted for or reasonably distributed.

But Jesus defended her: ”She has performed a good service for me” (Matthew 26:10). He recognized in her gesture the very same recklessness that beat in His own Sacred Heart. She had been loved much, and so she loved much in return, without measuring, without polishing the gesture for public approval.

The history of the saints is filled with such reckless lovers.

King David dancing naked in front of the Ark, earning the scorn of his wife. Saint Francis stripping himself naked in the town square to give back even his clothes to his earthly father. Saint Teresa of Avila riding into towns to found convents with hardly a coin to her name, trusting in Providence with a kind of holy audacity. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who declared that her vocation was love itself, choosing the smallest acts as her offerings because she had nothing grand to give. These were not measured, careful souls. They were reckless lovers, set ablaze by the Sacred Heart of Christ.

 

When the Heart Cannot Contain What It Holds

Why do any of us create anything at all? Why do we write, paint, sing, build, plant, cook, raise children, serve neighbors? If we are honest, the deepest answer is not duty. It is overflow. There is something inside us that demands expression because it cannot be contained.

The prophet Jeremiah described this overflow vividly: ”If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,’ then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot” (Jeremiah 20:9). This is not the calm, decorative piety of someone trying to impress. This is the desperate confession of a heart that has touched something infinite and now cannot help but pour it out.

The restlessness,. the weariness Jeremiah expressed, is the giveaway. We were made for infinite Love, and when that infinite Love begins to dwell in us, our finite hearts cannot possibly hold it. It must spill out somewhere. It must find a way to be expressed, however imperfectly.

This is what makes Christian creativity, and indeed Christian living, so radically different from the world’s standards. We are not creating to impress. We are not living to be admired. We are simply trying to find some way, any way, to give back a fraction of what we have received. We are trying to let love out before it consumes us.

 

The Beauty That Shines Through Imperfection

Here is the great paradox: when we stop trying to be sophisticated, something genuinely beautiful begins to emerge. Not the beauty of careful craftsmanship, but the beauty of authenticity, the beauty of a heart that has been touched by grace and is no longer afraid to show it.

This is the beauty of the cross itself. Isaiah prophesied of the Suffering Servant: ”He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2). By every external standard, the crucified Christ is not beautiful. And yet, when we gaze upon Him with the eyes of faith, we see a beauty deeper than any earthly aesthetic could provide. We see love made visible. We see the very heart of God laid bare.

Saint Paul knew this beauty when he wrote: ”But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us” (2 Corinthians 4:7). We are clay jars, cracked and ordinary. But what we hold inside, by sheer grace, is treasure beyond measure. The cracks do not diminish the treasure. In fact, the cracks are precisely where the light gets out.

When we offer our reckless love back to God, our cracks become channels of grace. Our imperfections become testimonies to the perfection of the One who loves us. The world does not need more polished performances of religion. The world needs to see clay jars overflowing with treasure they were never meant to contain.

In my forthcoming book, (DIS)EMBODIED: AI AND A THEOLOGY OF THE BODY, I offered this as a part of the introduction, which I hope shows how I view myself as a novelist:

This is the spirit in which I write all my books, especially my novels. As much as I am no theological giant, I am neither among the greatest novelists the history of the tradition has produced. I would not put myself on par with the likes of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, or Flannery O’Connor. My goal has never been literary excellence so much as to write stories as best I can that can, God willing, reach as many people as possible. I do not pay much attention to how my books might be critiqued as literature. I am not interested in fine appraisals, or even literary excellence. I simply speak stories from the heart, all of them to some degree reflections of the magnificent love I have received in sheer grace. My novels are simply an overflow of such love, an offering back, for my heart cannot contain all it has received. How can a finite heart, such as mine, possibly hold infinite Love, which is within me, as surely as the Trinity dwells within me? Much like my theology, my novels tend more toward reckless abandon than literary brilliance. Is not God’s love for us likewise reckless, somewhat unrefined by human standards? There is always a recklessness to love, something uncontainable, something that cannot be analyzed or polished. It is the love of a God who died on a bloodied Roman cross—hardly the image of sophistication and refined aesthetic taste. I do not mean to say that the cross is not beautiful. Quite the contrary! There is no beauty more profound, in fact, than that exhibited in the pierced flesh of our Crucified Lord. But it is a beauty that shines through the most grotesque of signs, refined not by appearance, but by radical love. As such, what I offer back to Him in my writing is an overflow of the same kind of unrefined, reckless love. I write because I do not know what else I could do, for what He places in my heart is not meant to be hoarded within my imagination, but explodes beyond the confines of the possession of my mind.  A critic might not find my novels to be particularly great literature. This does not concern me. No critic can deny the heart in which I write, which is a heart wholly claimed by His Sacred Heart. Thus, it is always my prayer when I write that it is His love—not my abilities—that shines through.

 

Living the Reckless Life

What does this mean for those of us who are not novelists, not artists, not anyone whose creative output will ever be evaluated by critics? It means everything. Because the principle of reckless love applies to every corner of the Christian life.

It means praying when you do not feel articulate, when your prayers feel clumsy and childish. God is not a literary critic of your prayer life. He is a Father who delights in your voice, no matter how unrefined.

It means serving without calculating whether your service will be noticed or appreciated. The widow’s two copper coins, given recklessly, were declared by Christ to be more than all the polished gifts of the wealthy (Mark 12:41-44).

It means loving people who cannot love you back, forgiving when forgiveness seems excessive, hoping when hope seems naïve. It means letting the love of God so fill you that it spills out in directions you cannot fully control or justify by worldly logic.

 

Practical Steps Toward Reckless Love

Here, then, are some practical ways to begin living this reckless love in daily life:

First, identify where you are polishing instead of loving. Where in your life have you become more concerned with appearances than with substance? Perhaps your prayer has become a performance, even a performance for yourself. Perhaps your service has become curated. Today, do one thing for God or for another person that you would never bother to tell anyone about. Let the gesture be unrefined and unwitnessed.

Second, practice the prayer of overflow rather than the prayer of obligation. Before you ask God for anything, simply spend a few minutes letting your heart overflow back to Him. Tell Him, in whatever clumsy words you have, what you have received. Let the gratitude itself become the prayer, even if it is messy and disjointed.

Third, contemplate the crucifix daily. Not the polished, beautiful crucifix only, but the reality of it. Let yourself sit with the recklessness of God’s love for you. Let it scandalize you a little. Let it undo your need to keep everything tidy.

Fourth, give something away that you cannot easily replace. This need not be money. It might be time, when you have none to spare. It might be attention, when your mind is exhausted. It might be the last word in an argument, when you are sure you are right. Practice the small breakings of alabaster jars.

Fifth, allow yourself to create, to express, to give voice to what God has placed in you, even if you are not particularly good at it. Sing in the shower. Write in a journal no one will read. Cook a meal with love, and maybe even "estimate" the measurements for a few of the ingredients. Plant a garden. Tell someone you love them in your own words. Let the treasure spill out of the clay jar.

The world will not always understand this kind of life. Critics, both internal and external, will find plenty to question. But the heart of Christ recognizes its own. The Sacred Heart that bled out so recklessly upon the cross is well pleased when our own small hearts learn to bleed out a little of His love into the world.

For in the end, the only measure of a life is the love that flowed through it. And love, true love, can never be polished into something respectable. It can only be poured out, like nard from a broken jar, like blood from a pierced side, like words from a heart that simply could not contain what it had been given.