What is the Love of God?

" ...more like a man Flying from something that he dreads than one who sought the thing he loved." William Wordsworth, "TINTERN ABBEY"

Fear and Panic: the Flight response come quickly to us.
Flight is an autonomous response. We have learned to play with it as we watch films of horror, gore, and violence; as we watch news reports of atrocities committed by others and by our own government. When people wonder why there is so much bad news, this is the reason: we are thrilled by the bad news for it titillates our inborn Flight response. This Fear & Flight response occurs universally across a wide range of human behavior.

Is there an autonomous and inborn response that attracts? Instead of causing us to flee and become a fugitive, does it bring us together? Is it universal across the range of human activity? Sexual attraction may come to mind, but it is limited to sexual behavior. It is not universal across human behavior.
The Love of God is the universal autonomous response of drawing-together. It is autonomous as it comes into being on its own. It is universal as it occurs across the range of all our behaviors. It draws the soul to God. I think some people experience when they imagine themselves to be in the proximity of a lovely sunset and thereupon say some tidbit like "Ah, Such Beauty! Thus do I affirm God's existence!" Thus they imagine themselves to have Faith.
That's fine. Faith uses the Love of God to create the structure of Faith. It is not a quid-pro-quo, but it does need the two participants-God and myself-to be fully serious about what we are doing and to be fully committed to it.

When I say it is not quid-pro-quo, I realize that I am disagreeing with those that believe that God rewards with carrots and punishes with sticks according as we obey or disobey. Faith comes into being as the Love of God pulls creation together. As two hands draw together in prayer, the hands create a structure- the "praying hands" of Durer's woodcuts, for example- and there is the space outside the hands and the space enclosed within the hands. We have a three dimensional structure.
When the hands draw apart, the structure dissipates. Each hand returns to solitude.

We are back at Dawn Consciousness of childhood. Love of God creates Faith. It is corrupted soon into the give-and-take, obey and reward, disobey and punish of the family life, of the economic life of mankind. That faith becomes the Universal Abacus of a miserly God. Faith is a structure that emerges into existence at our birth and requires absolutely no particular effort of anyone's part: it is essential to creation. Just as our tendency to flight is inborn-thus preserving our well being-so is our tendency to draw together-thus advancing our growth and progress.