will then become a subject!) to keep themselves both sane and happy. That love
object becomes our “North Star,” serving as our moral compass and our reason
to keep putting one foot in front of the other in a happy and hopeful way. All of
us need someone or something to connect our hearts with our heads. Love
grounds us by creating focus, direction, motivation, even joy—and if we don’t
find these things in love, we usually will try to find them in hate. Do you see
the consequences of this unmet need in our population today? I do.
One place where I often see a positive focus and purpose is in the
hardworking happiness of young mothers and fathers. Their new child becomes
their one North Star, and they know very clearly why they are waking up each
morning. This is the God Instinct, which we might just call the “need to adore.”
It is the need for one overarching focus, direction, and purpose in life, or what
the Hebrew Scriptures describe as “one God before you” (Exodus 20:3).
Parenting and family are the primary school for the love instinct, and always
will be. They serve as the basic container, in which the soul, the heart, the
body, and even the mind can flourish. Thus we leave one family only to create
another. When I worked in the jail for fourteen years, I saw that the inmates
even tried to create family there. Many insisted on calling me “Father” and their
best friends “Bro”! The need for secure grounding and mirroring never stops.
Humans seem to want, even need something (or someone) that we can give
ourselves to totally, something that focuses and gathers our affections. We need
at least one place where we can “kneel and kiss the ground,” as Rumi, the Sufi
poet and mystic, put it. Or as the French friar Eloi Leclerc (1921–2016)
beautifully paraphrased Francis: “If we knew how to adore, then nothing could
truly disturb our peace. We would travel through the world with the tranquility
of the great rivers. But only if we know how to adore.”*3 Of course, adoration is
finally the response to something Perfect. But the genius of love is that it
teaches us how to give ourselves to imperfect things too. Love, you might say, is
the training ground for adoration.