The Dread Of Eternal Love
Have you ever had a band that defined a whole season of your life—only for them to lose you somewhere along the way? That’s been true for me. For years, anyone who knew me knew my favorite band was the Avett Brothers. Their music gave voice to my soul. But for the past eight years or so, they hadn’t spoken to me in the same way.
Then, recently, they released a new project, and I decided to give it a chance. The very first song caught me. One line in particular has been reverberating inside me:
“Here in the spaces, here in the shadows
Behind the faces, beneath the souls
Everyone has it, everyone knows
The dread of Eternal Love.”
That phrase stopped me in my tracks: the dread of eternal love. Why would love inspire dread? And why does that sound strangely familiar to my own life?
Forgetting
Growing up in fundamentalist Christianity, I learned early that love had to be earned—through good behavior, through spiritual effort, through trying hard. And I did try hard. Yet slowly, God has opened me to a different truth: there is a great love available to me (and to you), and it isn’t earned at all. It is simply offered. But to receive it? That’s the hardest part.
This forgetting-and-remembering is nothing new. In Exodus, God’s people, freshly delivered from slavery, camped at the foot of Sinai. Their leader went up the mountain to meet God, and almost immediately, the people began to drift. They crafted their own god—one they could see and control. Don’t we all?
Contemplative practice calls this “the drift.” In meditation or centering prayer, we know what it is to be at center—to breathe, to rest, to align ourselves in Love. But then our thoughts scatter, our minds wander, and we drift. It happens again and again. The point is not to never drift, but to notice, and to return.
The Enneagram tells the same story. We begin life in our essence—our truest, most God-soaked selves. But quickly, we learn strategies for survival. We build personalities and identities that serve us well, but they also keep us from remembering who we really are. In somatic work, we even see this resistance woven into our very cells—our bodies are patterned to cling to ego, not essence.
We forget. Again and again, we forget.
Remembering
And yet, forgetting is not failure. Forgetting is the very path into remembering.
Jesus told a story about a son who wandered far from home, convinced he was no longer worthy of his father’s love. Then the text says something simple but profound: “he came to his senses.” He remembered who he was. And he turned home.
Rembrandt’s painting The Return of the Prodigal Son captures that moment of homecoming: the son collapsing into the arms of his father, and the father embracing him with both strength and tenderness. But Rembrandt also painted the other son—the one who stayed home, but who could not receive love either. In the story, the father goes out to him as well, reminding him that he, too, is beloved. Both sons had drifted. Both sons were sought out.
That is grace: the God who comes to meet us in our forgetting, and who calls us to remember again.
Receiving
Here’s where the Avett Brothers’ lyric hits home. If eternal love is real—if grace is true—why do we resist it? Why do we dread it?
Maybe because real love changes us. Nadia Bolz-Weber once said that if grace is true, then when we sit down at the banquet table of heaven, we’ll find ourselves placed between the two people we least wanted to see there. Eternal love dismantles our illusions of who is deserving. It levels the ground.
And when we can’t receive that kind of love for ourselves, we live in scarcity. We judge. We withhold. We want villains to get what’s coming to them. That’s the work of the ego. But when we soften into receiving the love of God, abundance begins to flow—not only toward us, but through us to others.
The truth is, we are far more skilled at resisting love than at receiving it. Receiving feels like loss of control. Receiving feels too good to be true. Receiving feels dangerous.
And yet, beneath all our resistance, at the core of the universe is a love we cannot manufacture or destroy. A love that is not earned but offered. A love that is already here.
So maybe the work before us is not to strive harder or prove ourselves worthy. Maybe the work is to pause. To notice the drift. To remember. And to risk receiving the love that is already ours.
There is plenty of darkness in the world. But there is also eternal love—here in the shadows, here in the spaces. Let’s open our hands and hearts and see what happens when we let that love in.
Watch the video to “Eternal Love” below…