We are better acquainted with the absence of love, or the misuse of love, or the betrayal of love than we are love resplendent. Then what is the problem? Why do we have so much difficulty experiencing spectacular love?
The key question is: Where does love come from? That is an extremely baffling and confusing question. Does love come from somewhere or someone else? Actually, both are true. Love comes, ultimately from everything and everyone. Yet if we seek to make that our sole source of love, we will live a life of constant disappointment. What if the people around me are incapable of giving me the love I need? What if nature becomes hostile rather than beautiful, evoking fear rather than radiating love? We become bereft and forlorn.
Although love comes from everything and everyone, the only source of love that we can count on is from ourselves. Only when we find the source of love from within ourselves can we find a constant source not dependent upon other people and things. But that becomes a hall of mirrors, too!
We have a lot of stuff going on within ourselves that interferes with our experience of the well-spring of love deep within us. The most difficult thing to control in the universe is our mind. Our mind constantly seeks to find the course of least resistance, to find a place where there is no pain and only comfort resides. Our mind tries to create an image of ourselves that makes us happy and avoids pain. We often end up living life in an illusion rather than tapping into the well-spring of love that constantly flows deep within our soul.
Love comes from the deepest well-spring of our soul. Yet, if we stop there, we have still stopped short. If we look for love only in the depths of our soul, only in ourself, we are trying to fix on a moving point. If we look for love only within ourself, we have stopped just short of the real source of love.
The real source of love is beyond ourself. Yet the only way to find that love beyond ourself is by going through ourself. That is extremely tricky! Yet the goal is well worth the struggle. If we succeed in finding the source of love through our mind and heart, yet beyond them, we enter into the infinite source and creator of love, God. We discover God within ourselves as the portal to the infinite God who is love.
God is the source of love and the creator of love. Only when our love is set firm in God's love within ourself yet beyond ourself will we find the power to love others in a way that transforms them, that transforms ourselves.
Real love, true love, love that originates in God within and beyond us, is a revolutionary force, a creative force. When we tap into that love, we become someone who is able to love others even if we are not loved in return. We become people who can forgive those who have offended us, who have scorned our love, who have disrespected our person.
Forgiveness is the most difficult of all acts, especially when someone has violated our trust, our love, our pride. Finding the power to forgive those who have violated us is only possible when we receive our love from beyond ourself in God. During a time of violent and hateful struggle in India between Hindu and Muslim, Gandhi meet with a Hindu man who had just killed a Muslim child. He had killed him out of rage for the murder of his son by a Muslim. The Hindu sought Gandhi's help to find a way out of his torment. Gandhi told him to find a Muslim boy whose parents had been killed in the rioting and raise the boy as his own.
Surely that advice rates right up there with Solomon's judgment in the dispute between two women who both claimed the same baby. He ordered the baby cut in two, and half given to each. The mother who begged for the baby's life, asking Solomon to give it to the other, proved the real mother. Real love is the willingness to lose the person rather than see them die. (1 Kings 3:26)
Giving up your life for another is the highest form of love. As Jesus said, "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13) It is no coincidence that the Medal of Honor is given to soldiers who throw themselves on a hand grenade to save his fellow. Measure that against the act of strapping a bomb under your clothing to blow up women, children, elderly, and youth in a crowded market place.
Most of us count on others to feel love; our parents, our brothers and sisters, our children, our friends. If some how they do not show us love, we feel unloved, we become depressed and angry or withdrawn. Most violent crimes are between people who know each other, often because one feels unloved or their love has been violated.
Yet, when we know the truth, that love comes from within ourself, even beyond ourself, rather than from others, we focus on our power to love rather than on being loved. We understand that the greatest transforming power in the world is love. We realize that we possess the power to transform others and ourselves through the power of love. Rather than
victims who are unloved, we are champions of love who change the world around us through that power.
Thank you, Daniel, for that very poignant explanation of the Source of Love, especially "our power to love rather than on being loved." Indeed, giving brings its own reward. Best always, Bento
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