The God Who Throws Nothing Away
God as a Love Recycler
“We have created a ‘throwaway culture’ which is now spreading.”
— Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §22
“Human beings too are treated as consumer goods to be used and then discarded.”
— Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, §53
“The excluded are not the ‘exploited’ but the outcast, the leftovers.”
— Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, §53
In Thomas Oord's A Systematic Theology of Love (Vol. I), he offers four analogies or metaphors for understanding God. God is like wind or breath, like a mind, like gravity, and like the "life" within a living creature. At other points he imagines God as a Musician and a Companion. One of his favorite metaphors is Spirit or, better, The Universal Spirit of Love.
His freedom to use metaphors encourages our own. I suggest that can also imagine God in still one more way: as a Love Recycler who saves everything, wanting nothing to be lost, and who recycles the positive energy of the world - the love - back into the world, again and again.
One thing for sure, the universal Spirit of love - God - is not a garbologer. A garbologer is someone who believes in trash and wants to discard things who thinks that many things in life, including people, are expendable. Many a garbologer has a cynical and an elitist side: "“People talk about dignity as if it were a fact of nature. It isn’t. Some people build the world; the rest are debris left after construction. I am a garbologer: I sort the garbage and decide what must be thrown away.”
By contrast, God is closer to a Shepherd who searches for lost sheep, or a woman who searches for a lost coin. Indeed God might be a bit of a holy hoarder—one who saves all that can be saved. At least this is the case if we take Whitehead's image of God seriously. In Whitehead's philosophy there is an element in divine love for the world that seeks to save everything. Whitehead puts it this way: "He saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved.” God loves the world "with a tender care that nothing be lost."
This is not a God who easily discards things. Truth be told, God is also a love recycler. Whitehead writes:
His freedom to use metaphors encourages our own. I suggest that can also imagine God in still one more way: as a Love Recycler who saves everything, wanting nothing to be lost, and who recycles the positive energy of the world - the love - back into the world, again and again.
One thing for sure, the universal Spirit of love - God - is not a garbologer. A garbologer is someone who believes in trash and wants to discard things who thinks that many things in life, including people, are expendable. Many a garbologer has a cynical and an elitist side: "“People talk about dignity as if it were a fact of nature. It isn’t. Some people build the world; the rest are debris left after construction. I am a garbologer: I sort the garbage and decide what must be thrown away.”
By contrast, God is closer to a Shepherd who searches for lost sheep, or a woman who searches for a lost coin. Indeed God might be a bit of a holy hoarder—one who saves all that can be saved. At least this is the case if we take Whitehead's image of God seriously. In Whitehead's philosophy there is an element in divine love for the world that seeks to save everything. Whitehead puts it this way: "He saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved.” God loves the world "with a tender care that nothing be lost."
This is not a God who easily discards things. Truth be told, God is also a love recycler. Whitehead writes:
What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world. In this sense, God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.
Thus we have the image of a God who loves to save things and is a love recycler. Everything is remembered, felt, and preserved within the ongoing life of God. And every moment of love is recycled, again and again, forever,
The idea that God is a save and a love recycler requires a critique of what we might call the garbalogical mindset, especially as applied to people and other living beings.This is a way of seeing the world that treats some people as dispensable, as discardable. It sorts the world into the worthy and the expendable. In our present cultural landscape, those most vulnerable to this way of thinking often include:
- The elderly, whose economic productivity has diminished and whose care is sometimes regarded primarily as a fiscal burden.
- The unborn, regarded by some as unplanned, inconvenient, or obstructive to personal autonomy.
- The disabled, interpreted through the lenses of cost and accommodation rather than personhood and presence.
- Migrants and refugees, framed as threats to order, cohesion, or cultural stability.
- The poor, reduced to narratives of personal failure rather than understood within wider patterns of structural injustice.
- The incarcerated, whose wrongdoing—real or alleged—renders them socially invisible, morally reduced to their worst act, and often excluded from the horizon of rehabilitation and reintegration.
Different ideological communities emphasize different groups. Yet the deeper logic remains the same: the temptation to treat some lives as waste.
The open and relational vision suggested by Thomas Oord and many others points in a different direction. If every actuality is a subject of experience, and if God’s tenderness “loses nothing that can be saved,” then no life is merely disposable. Even where tragedy, wrongdoing, or brokenness occurs, the deeper metaphysical truth remains: nothing that has lived is simply trash.
From this perspective, the calling of a compassionate society is clear. It is to resist the garbalogical mindset. It is to refuse the habit of sorting people into those who count and those who do not. It is to build communities in which the vulnerable are not treated as burdens but as fellow participants in the adventure of existence.
If God gathers the world with such tenderness, then perhaps human beings are invited to do something similar—to live in ways that recognize the dignity of every life and to create forms of community in which no one is treated as waste.
- Jay McDaniel