I wrote the following on November 26, 2011, when I lived in Portland, Oregon. It was a powerful time in my life for many reasons. I share this again because I still feel and believe it as much as I did then.
Our magnificent Earth, spread out before us like a rich banquet, was always meant to be a lover's playground, a paradise in which we would sense and feel the Great Lover's presence, who also shared with us His own love, wisdom, and perfect union with our own souls.
Our magnificent Earth, spread out before us like a rich banquet, was always meant to be a lover's playground, a paradise in which we would sense and feel the Great Lover's presence, who also shared with us His own love, wisdom, and perfect union with our own souls.
This beautifully diverse planet was meant to be our home, with challenges to our survival to teach and evolve us spiritually and with gifts of food, companionship of the animals, beauty from the flowers, rivers, mountains and valleys. The ecstatic beauty around mirrored the passion and joy of our own love embedded within us, the greatest of gifts from our Creator.
Our life here was always meant to be about love, the spiritual essence of the Great Lover, who with His love courted our love and was overjoyed with its return. Whenever we loved another, the Great Lover felt His own love returned to Him. We were created to love. We were made into material form from spiritual substance, to be a container for the Great Lover's own love, to experience in the deepest regions of our eternal souls the greatest of loves, borne first on the wings of our very ordinary human love - the love of two people.
It was always meant to be simple. Love is simple. It flows like a river, as the I Ching says and as Jesus says to the woman at the well. Are we not all like that woman at the well, seeking eternal truth in a world now flooded with deceit? But are we all willing to offer a cup of water to a stranger?
When we open our hearts, we are lifting the stone rock that covers the well. When we sing in joy; dance in free abandon; selflessly hold another's secrets or wounds or hands or embrace another in love to share that great love the Great Lover has placed within our own beings, we draw from the great well.
When we look into the eyes of our human lover, we see into his or her soul with our own. In that moment, we are the most honest, the most holy. In those moments, we are drawing from that well.
When we love another, our minds are freed from our ego, own fear, competition and greed. Love breaks the bondage of the ego. It is the ultimate freedom from a world of judgment, criticism, selfish consumption, punishment.
When we are drunk in love, we can sing in the rain, push through winter's stormy ferocity without feeling the cold or wet. That love makes us courageous and free. In those moments, we move beyond our own limited humanity and are connected with our truest, most sacred nature, our divine nature, our most human nature. In those moments, we touch God in the flowing of His love through our own inner wells into the heart of another.
There is no salvation for the soul
but to fall in Love.
It has to creep and crawl
among the lovers first.
Only Lovers can escape
from these two worlds
This was written in Creation.
Only from the Heart
can you reach the sky
The rose of Glory
can only be raised in the Heart.
- Rumi
When fear or trauma closes our hearts, we can sink into the darker layers of our human experience, a den of thieves where the ego reigns, oppressing, hungering to feed itself until it grows into a dragon, frothing in fiery hate and anger, preying on others with its lies, which are a mockery, a broken mirror offering only shards of love.
Maybe the world has forgotten there is or ever was a well in the heart. We could slay that ancient foe if we were willing to open our hearts, risk the scorn and ridicule of fear. Are we willing to open that dark den of pain, where our soul has been languishing a lifetime? Are we willing to hold our own self, our "inner child," separated for a lifetime from the source of its life by our own betrayal, our own self victimization? It takes great courage to open our hearts - maybe first to another and then to ourselves, where we can encounter our own divine child.
In each chance to love, we are given a gift from the Great Lover to try again, to love again, to enter into the great marriage, the divine love relationship.
This great love, is what it was always all about. It may be the essence, the center, of the teachings of the very earliest church, the one I see as the only authentic Christian church, which met secretly centuries before the formation of the Roman Church with its popes, male hierarchy and magisterium, which came to rule the western world like the oppressive monarchies with which it once kept intimate company.
The first of Jesus' miracles was the wedding at Cana, a living parable of what real love, a wedding of our selves with the Great Lover, would be like. It transforms us from ordinary beings into spirited beings. It changes our dull lives into lives of so much joy, so much vitality. It lifts off the stone that covers our inner well, where the light of love, the sacred substance of God flows freely, unrestrained by any of the dark powers of this world.
When we accept the invitation life gives us to love another, despite our simple, flawed, frightened and broken human lives, we meet the divine lover, the Beloved, in the eyes of another simple, flawed, human being. I truly feel that God would rather we reach to love another than live in fear's dark pit. It may be the most courageous thing we ever do, but to live with a closed heart is not to live; it atrophies our soul, diminishes our light and wastes our precious time here doing nothing.
Those who don't feel this love
pulling them like a river,
those who don't drink dawn
like a cup of spring water
or take in sunset like supper,
those who don't want to change,
let them sleep.
This love is beyond the study of theology,
that old trickery and hypocrisy.
If you want to improve your mind that way;
sleep on.
I've given up on my brain,
I've torn the cloth to shreds
and thrown it away.
If you're not completely naked,
wrap your beautiful robe of words around you,
and sleep.
- Rumi
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