It is perhaps our usual assumption that we exist first, and then that we love. But let us imagine that our existence depends on our relationship with those we love. The more we love, or the more we are loved, the more existence or reality we acquire. Our being derives from the company of those who love us, and if they begin to love us less, we begin to disappear. Love is not a passion or emotion. Love is communion, made up of those relationships that give us our existence. Only love can continue to sustain us when all the material threads of life are broken and we are without any other support. If these threads are not reconnected we cease to exist; death is the snapping of the last thread. Love, or communion with other persons, is stronger than death and is the source of our existence. That ‘God is love‘ means that God is the communion of this holy trinity. God the Father would lose his identity and being if he did not have the Son. If we took away the communion of the trinity to make God a unit, God would not be communion and therefore would not be love.
John Zizioulas Lectures in Christian Dogmatics
