Christmas love

Out beyond this joyous busy season, in the silent night of eternity, love's elegant, magnetic, electric presence softly resonates between two lovers. As two lights in the night sky, they embrace the sweetest Christmas love ever known. Their love is, as it always has been, even after all these years, a perfect mirror of God's purest passionate and abounding love for each of us.

Rising within each soul, like the full moon at midnight, is a breathless love, gasping in awe and surrender with each heartbeat, as strong as the mountains and raging rivers that cut their way through the earth's soft surface, carving green valleys, as they empty themselves into the vast ocean.

This love, this gift, arrived in our oppressive and weary war-torn world as greatness wrapped in simplicity, wealth hidden in humility, divinity embedded in humanity, a glistening radiant diamond in a dark coal mine. 

His glance across the hillside, filled with masses eager to hear his message, drew her to him, igniting something within her heart she had never felt before. The sweet blue bird lifted from its sleepy perch within her breast, dispelling all the lies, deceit, betrayal, exploitation and oppression she had only known. His glance met hers, and the world was never the same. They found a secret in the love they shared, one from which the world is still reeling and yet still does not comprehend. They knew the power of creation in the movement of their breath driven by a deep inner knowing only they understood.

The false version of power with which the world had been grappling was never real. It was a terrible, twisted lie, oppressive and soulless, masquerading as real. It had no power of its own. It only had what it stole from the people it had enslaved through fear, control, manipulation, guilt and deception. 

The authentic power of love which would one day be ignited within us, the same as that shared between those two first lovers, is the free abandon of life itself only the creator can give. The seed for it, which he later would liken to a 'mustard seed' was already there as part of humanity's original design by God. It was prolific, drawing each soul into flight, well beyond the known boundaries of the time, then and now. 

"Where does the sky end?" she asked him, smiling softly into his dark brown eyes in the coolness of the evening in the garden where they whispered to each other.

Human beings always had the capability of loving this way, but remained blinded to it by the controlling powers who hardened our hearts through fear. The love remained ungerminated, only ever in a state of potential, never rooting and blooming. Igniting that awareness of who we really are and the great potential for wisdom and love we contained within us, only needed to be switched on by our awareness and perhaps lit as a candle is lit, by God's love. 

He was born a lover, ever so much more than a king.  His regal and divine power was woven with compassion, courage, wisdom and gentleness.  Everything he said, everything he did was composed of love, a love that knew no boundaries.  It was always about love, right up until the end and even beyond.

So is it such a surprise that he would love a woman?  Women then were not respected for their wisdom or intelligence. Then, as now, it was very much a man's world, polarized, steeped in the rigidity of control and legalism.  It couldn't move with the gentle breeze that swept the reeds in the shallow marsh. It was hard and merciless, cold and sterile.  He loved her as the dance loves the dancer, as the song loves the singer and the sun loves the amber hues reflecting off the horizon at the end of day.

Why wouldn't he have loved her with this great passion he contained in his divine heart?  If he could love a leper, a blind man, a dead man and a child, along with all the other good, bad and ugly of his time - genuinely and passionately love them - why wouldn't he have loved a woman?  Aren't women deserving of love even as much as a corrupt tax collector or diseased person?  What is it about the man's world that just can't believe that he could love a woman? 

But, there is so much evidence that he did love her. If he were a man who loved so much that he would allow his life to be taken rather than renounce his truth, with an astounding force of heroic courage, wouldn't he engage in this dance of cosmic divine love? His love for her must have been profound. The light within him must have radiated like the sun at noontime, and she, in response, must have glowed like the full moon shimmering outside my window on this cold December night. 

Those who have written about the two lovers described him as solar and she as lunar, two halves of the cosmic whole meeting. Her glow was his reflected light. While she certainly had her own light, she had the capacity in her own regal divinity to receive the intensity of his love and return it to him. The cosmos must have delighted in their passionate light dance spinning stars and galaxies in tune to their own music.

Love is stirred within us when we look into the eyes of another and listen deeply to their heart, their joys, their hurts and their longing. It is our heart flowing with theirs. It is a merging of the spiritual with the earthen. It is God's immeasurable love for humanity that is celebrated in a very human kind of love.