As Good A Place As Any
Jesus said that the highest law is to love:
"...God with every passion of your heart, with all the energy of your being, and with every thought that is within you.' And the second is like it in importance: 'You must love your friend in the same way you love yourself.'"*
How do you love The Divine?
By loving those around you. By loving the earth. By loving yourself. By simply loving.
Love is of one piece - it's a single reality. It is a direction you move in, a way you live, a force that directs your energies. It is the means and the end; the start and the middle and the finish.
In his first memoir, John wrote:
"If anyone boasts, "I love God," and goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing of it, he is a liar. If he won't love the person he can see, how can he love the God he can't see? The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God includes loving people. You've got to love both."*
It's that simple. Which that doesn't mean it's easy. Living a life of love is inconvenient, messy, and often controversial. It will take you to places you never dreamed possible in strange, wonderful, and sometimes disturbing ways. It will disrupt your concepts of power and control and comfort. It will wondrously mess up your ideas of what is proper and holy and true.
And it will set you free and light you up and lead you home again and again and again.
Love will do that.
Frederick Buechner said:
"The first stage is to believe that there is only one kind of love. The middle stage is to believe that there are many kinds of love and that the Greeks had a different word for each of them. The last stage is to believe that there is only one kind of love.
The unabashed eros of lovers, the sympathetic philia of friends, agape giving itself away freely no less for the murderer than for the victim (the King James Version translates it as "charity") - these are all varied manifestations of a single reality. To lose yourself in another's arms, or in another's company, or in suffering for all who suffer, including the ones who inflict suffering upon you-to lose yourself in such ways is to find yourself. Is what it's all about. Is what love is.
Of all powers, love is the most powerful and the most powerless. It is the most powerful because it alone can conquer that final and most impregnable stronghold that is the human heart. It is the most powerless because it can do nothing except by consent.
To say that love is God is romantic idealism. To say that God is love is either the last straw or the ultimate truth."
Speaking the truth in love is, more often than not, a justification of spiritual abuse and plain old meanness. There's a difference between having an open opinion about something you believe (most truths are highly subjective) and being abusive. Love is not abusive. When it comes to figuring out what truth is the one you should lead with, find that centre of love within yourself and see if it tracks all the way to it.
Rachel Held Evans said:
"When Peter, a devout Jew, encountered the hospitality and faith of the Roman centurion Cornelius, he made the radical decision to not only meet with the Gentile, but to set aside nearly every kosher restriction in the Book and share a meal with him. "It is against our law for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile," Peter confesses to his new friend. "But God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean" (Acts 10:28). The apostles remembered what many modern Christians tend to forget that what makes the gospel offensive isn't who it keeps out but who it lets in."
Love doesn't close things down, it opens them right up. And here is as good a place as any for things to open and bloom and find their being.
REMEMBER: "Of all powers, love is the most powerful and the most powerless. It is the most powerful because it alone can conquer that final and most impregnable stronghold that is the human heart. It is the most powerless because it can do nothing except by consent." Frederick Buechner.
More tomorrow...
Written by Liz Milani
* 1 John 4:20.