Love as a substance

Just to go on another tangent, I was watching an episode of the X-Files the other night called Milagro, in which love was described as a substance not of this earth, which humans are unable to create, and the only power we have over it is to destroy it.

Playing with this imagery, one might imagine that love is 'something' that comes from God (1 John 4:7-21, especially verse 10). One might envisage that love is an unseen or spiritual 'substance' that only manifests as we, through faith, pour it out to another (Faith, hope, love). God is love (1 John 4:16) and all love comes from God, and God indeed commands that we love one another just as he loves us. So, using this imagery, can we ascertain what is actually happening when we love?

Perhaps God's own self-giving essence (ousia) is 'poured out' (to death) into the beloved in a kind of perichoretic fashion. Perhaps what we see in the beloved which drives us to love is not actually anything of value (as I have said earlier that it is the perception of this preciousness which evokes our loving response), but rather we see the need, the absence of wholeness that yearns to be whole, that yearns to be filled with what only God can provide: himself. Perhaps loving is the completion of the other with God's all-sufficient indwelling. The completion of the God-shaped hole. Or to put it into metaphors that I like to play with, to put God into the image of God.