In the center of Love's embrace is the circle of the soul and the body. For just as the Word of God penetrates all creation, so does the soul penetrate the whole body like wind flowing through a house or like a sower seeding fertile ground or like a mother soothing her crying babe. Yet all these wonder are held in the arms of Love an are linked in a delicate balance in a universe creted to be of service to humanity so men and women can work with it.
~ from SCARLET MUSIC: A Life of Hildegard of Bingen by Joan Ohanneson
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
We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes... Our homesickness is alleviated only by love, the love that transcends our self-centeredness, our pettiness... When we are truly in love, not in the sense of romantic, erotic love, but in the sense of God's love for all that the Power of Love created, then our homesickness is alleviated. When we are in love we are no longer homesick, for Love is home.
~ from THE ROCK THAT IS HIGHER by Madeleine L'Engle
For inasmuch as this flame is a flame of the Divine Life, it wounds the soul with the tenderness of the life of God; and so deeply ... does it wound it and fill it with tenderness that causes it to melt in love, so that there may be fulfilled in it that which came to pass in the Bride in the Song of Songs; she conceived such great tenderness that she melted away.
