The unfathomable mystery of God is that God is a Lover who wants to be loved. God not only says: "You are my Beloved". God also asks: "Do you love me?" and offers us countless chances to say "Yes" to our inner truth. The spiritual life, thus understood, radically changes everything. Being born and growing up, leaving home and finding a career, being praised and being rejected, walking and resting, praying and playing, becoming ill and being healed -- yes, living and dying -- they all become expressions of that divine question: "Do you love me?" And at every point of the journey there is the choice to say "Yes" and the choice to say "No".
The Light of God surrounds you,
The Love of God enfolds you,
The Power of God protects you,
The Presence of God watches over you;
Wherever you are, God is.
KNOW that all who live in the magnified Presence
are forever advancing towards the moment of
Great Realization
in their lives.
The Light that shines in the Silence,
in that space of Awakening,
is beyond the brilliance of even the greatest Sun.
It is the Light of your Heart.
and your Heart is the Morning Star.
O listen if you would,
for therein lies a teaching.
GREETINGS and BLESSINGS from the silence, friends. May these darkest of days that lead to renewed light be a reminder to each of us to live according to our own highest light. Thus, will more light be given. May we remember to pause in the mist of this busiest of seasons to listen in reverence to the heart's voice.
Contact with the Divine Beloved is never complete until some other human being feels more loved and cherished as a result of its contact. Further, as all who have ever communed with the Beloved have discovered, the more deeply you encounter the Divine Lover, the more sensitively you feel the agony of the world; the more you are called to care more, feel more and think more deeply about decay in the social and moral order. You live in a state of radical empathy with all those in need. You are transparent to the agony of the world. Together with the Beloved, you must reach out to allay this suffering, or to do what you can in the light of the perspective of grace and the energy of spiritual partnership.
Ecstatic love for God -- heart and mind melted by passionate longing for Truth -- is the one essential factor in the process of awakening. Divine Presence, however one may understand and experience it, exists in and through all conscious beings... Merged in motiveless love, one experiences every moment the tremendous natural attraction of Divine Presence. This Presence is the inner guidance that we feel flowing through us as conscience, intellect, intuition, sense perception, and longing. Divine Presence alone generates the yearning of our heart, the seeking of our mind, the ease of our body, the illumination of our soul.
If we make our goal to live a life of compassion and unconditional love, the world will indeed become a garden where all kinds of flowers can bloom and grow.
If your heart is not full of Love, you won't see love anywhere. But if your heart is soaked with the Presence of Love, you will recognize that presence. Where we come together in very simple ways, we sense the presence. Where people are vulnerable together in a quiet way, there is real strength. That is where the realm of LOVE is shaped.
Coming from Love is coming from the heart, the heart of the One Spirit within, and touching other hearts in unity of God's purpose and peace. Loving yourself is the first step home; loving all else is the way, the path; and being Love is the journey's end; for once you become that which you are -- LOVE -- you shall truly be Home.
~ from TALKS WITH JONATHAN with gratitude to Robin Miller
Spiritual understanding centers on the acceptance of a divine truth, which gradually reveals itself, rising on the horizon of the mind till it pervades all. If the mind and its reactions are brought into willing obedience to that truth, the divine truth continues to permeate the mind even more and the mind develops with it endlessly... It is we who must yield to the love of God so that our minds may be open to the divine truth.
Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one "object" of love... If I truly love one person, I love all persons, I love the world. I must be able to say, "I love in you everybody. I love through you the world, I love in you also myself."
~ from THE ART OF LOVING by Erich Fromm 0061129739
