Talking about intimacy in our time is usually reduced to sex, to a catalog of physiological experiences or to the banality of a dating app. However, as Ulrich L. Lehner reminds us, the term comes from the Latin intimus, “the most interior.” And there begins the scandal: God is not content with greeting us from heaven like a polite neighbor, but claims to enter to the marrow of our life. Do we really want a God who knows what we hide even from our closest friends?
Naked Before God
The great mystics knew this well. Teresa de Ávila or Matilde de Magdeburgo spoke of a sensual love with God, a nakedness without masks or disguises. Genesis, with its account of Adam and Eve walking naked in paradise, offers us the most brutal image: not only bodies uncovered, but hearts without shame. Sin introduced the mask, clothing as a wall against vulnerability. Since then, we live hiding guilt and fabricating excuses; and God, in his infinite irony, keeps asking us: “Where are you?”.
The Lover Who Wounds
Christianity is scandalous because it presents a God who does not play at being a kindly grandfather, but an exacting lover. It is not enough to behave “nicely”; the biblical God demands passion, total surrender, renunciation of tepid comfort. And, like all true love, it wounds. Divine forgiveness is not a bureaucratic act of clemency: it involves suffering in one’s own flesh the betrayal, as Christ on the cross. Calling such a God “kind” would be to insult him.
Divine Vulnerability
God arrives naked in the world, in the fragility of a child in Bethlehem, and ends up suffocated on a piece of wood. That vulnerability disconcerting: a God who allows himself to be wounded to forgive, who exposes himself to the rejection of his creatures, who becomes flesh to burn with love. Divine intimacy is not a poetic metaphor, but torn flesh. And here is the irony: the modern world, which prides itself on authenticity, cannot bear a God who looks at it without filters, who demands that it drop all masks.
The Love That Begets Life
Divine love is not content with passing emotions. Like in marriage, like in art, like in procreation, that love creates new life. St. John Paul II explained it in his Theology of the Body: the yes between spouses is an image of God’s irrevocable yes to humanity. To reject it is to condemn oneself to a sterile, boring, “light” love. And Lehner does not spare blows: thinking of a God reduced to “being nice” is a caricature as ridiculous as it is dangerous.
In Dios no mola, Ulrich L. Lehner reminds us that the Christian God is not a “motivational coach” nor a “celestial therapist,” but a passionate lover who demands total surrender. A God too intimate for the superficiality of our time. A book that is not read lightly, because it leaves the uncomfortable sensation of having been discovered.