"Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being. Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves."Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Simply love. This is all Christ, or any other enlightened master, has ever asked of us. Love fully, love freely, and love completely. Love to the bottom of our hearts, to the depths of our souls, using every moment as an opportunity to express gratitude for our blessings and to renew our devotion to one another.
It's such a deceptively simple instruction—so deceptive that we rarely find it being followed in a wholehearted way in our own lives or in the world around us. This is one of the central paradoxes of Christ's message: it is so simple that almost everyone misses it. So simple that most of us would have an easier time walking through the eye of a needle than we would walking the path of God's love.
But it's hard to love so fully. Even hearing the words "simply love" can sound banal. We've become habituated to our world, and when we are so locked into our own day-to-day habits it can be very difficult to see the universe as a living manifestation of God's love. But being so habituated is not itself a bad thing. It's an interesting irony that while the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the stairway to heaven is built upon steps of habit—morphogenetic habits that constantly add new layers of depth to the universe; kosmic tendencies that have led from inert matter to chaotic biology, to the abstractions of mind, and onward into the soul of the future. The idea is not to eliminate our habits altogether, but to bring awareness to them—to make subject into object and loosen the grip of the habituated mind, allowing for more spontaneous outbursts of love, clarity, and joy.
Image: Love is a Riot by Android Jones [+view gallery]
While it's true that we are all suspended within God's Heart, drenched by the ubiquitous Presence of Her love—infinitely patient, infinitely abundant, and infinitely available—our own hearts are anything but infinite, and forever incapable of reflecting the full effulgence of God's love. The human heart is a bloody and broken thing, stippled with scars, shrouded in shadow, and horrified by its own fleshy mortality. Our hearts will inevitably fail us, falling short of our ideals, recoiling at the first hint of fear, and inevitably leading us astray. Sometimes we even allow our hearts to wound the ones around us while recklessly pursuing some form of comfort or convenience. Our hearts are damned to disappoint — which might explain why the principle of forgiveness plays such a central role in the Christian faith.
We are asked to love beyond our means, but never to be any more perfect than we always already are.
We are simply invited to recognize ourselves as what, in the deepest recesses of our minds, we already know ourselves to be.
We know that every hardship we've ever suffered, every humiliation, every betrayal, and every silent defeat, all of this carves an ever-deepening channel into our hearts, allowing us in turn to contain more love, more joy, and more liberation. But we also know that no matter how full our hearts may be at any given time, they can always be fuller. They can always continue to grow and strengthen, pumping more and more of God's love into the world. The human heart seems to be designed to grow. It is a work-in-progress (or, if you like, poetry-in-motion) and is constantly changing and evolving. We are, after all, created in the image of God, and our hearts are each a reflection of God's own Sacred Heart.
As such, our hearts continue to evolve just as the rest of the universe continues to evolve, increasing the force, range, and duration of our love to unimaginable magnitudes. As the creative force of Eros exerts its extropic pull upon the universe, so does a natural pressure build within us, an innate urge to expand and come ever-closer to our own limitless potential.
This is what drives us to practice, to exercise the multiple dimensions of our existence.
We exercise our physical form so that we can more fully embody our love. Our bodies are both temples of worship and furnaces of will. It is within our bodies that our beliefs become our practices, our ideals interface with our behaviors, and our compassion is transformed into action. By deepening our relationship with our own bodies and striving to be as healthy as our anatomies allow us, we dramatically increase our own ability to respond to the pressures of the world with unyielding strength, courage, and kindness.
We exercise our emotions and explore our shadows so that we can discover all those broken pieces of ourselves we have long forgotten about—dark splinters of psyche and nerve-ridden filaments of neurosis that often remain completely hidden from us, distorting our perceptions of ourselves, of our relationships, and of the world around us, and ultimately suffocating the potency of our love.
We exercise our minds so that we can cultivate the mental clarity and sophistication required to understand God's word and to recognize the patterns running through the universe around us. Our minds grow through lens after lens of values and worldviews, great stained-glass mosaics with increasingly intricate patterns and colors, each window refracting the light of God's love in very different ways.
Image: The Embrace by Sheri Munce [+view gallery]
And finally, we exercise our spirituality so that we can more fully realize Christ's instruction to simply love. We intuit that this entire manifest world—all the sin, all the suffering, and all the painful fragmentation—is really just a misdirection, an elaborate ruse to distract our attention from... something we once knew, but have long fogotten.
The world is an illusion.
And so we close our eyes to the world, sinking into the inner room at the core of our own souls, looking beyond the frenzied noise of thought to the all-pervasive silence behind all things. We are each alone in the unimaginable quiet, the only place we could ever hope to hear the seraphic whispers of God's voice.
God alone is real.
And so, sitting right here in the center of consciousness, right now before the Throne of the Lord, here and now in the timeless Kingdom of God, we begin to pray.
We surrender ourselves to the infinite Other, catching glimpses of our timeless Beloved dancing behind chimera clouds, and falling even deeper in love with the unmentionable Mystery. God alone is real, and we pray before Him for guidance, for inspiration, for forgiveness, and for the strength to love.
And through the very act of praying, our prayers are answered.
By recognizing the intrinsic Oneness of God and submitting ourselves to something so undeniably greater than our ordinary selves, our hearts are opened even further, allowing even more of God's love to flow through our veins.
Feeling a gentle warmth growing within us, we begin to tumble upwards through our hearts. Wiping away the already-fading memories of Theosophy, we open our freshly baptized eyes and watch the world explode into a carnival of bliss and color, the faint hum of love emanating from everything we see.
God is the world.
Fully human and fully divine, we feel the rhythm of two hearts beating in our chests and a palpable current of electricity flowing through our bodies, threading all of our souls together in the sweet melodies of love.
Awash in the sacred Hymns of creation, we all look at each other, gazing tenderly at every face we see. Some we know as friends and family, some we recognize on the street from our daily routines, and a great many more we've never seen before. We look into each other's eyes, we share a single universal smile, and we simply love. We love as fully and freely as we've ever loved, holding this moment as the most precious moment we've ever known, as if this were the only moment we will ever share again—knowing that, in a very real sense, it is.
And there has never been anything more beautiful.
About Corey deVos
Corey W. deVos is editor and producer of Integral Life. He has worked for Integral Institute/Integal Life since Spring of 2003, and has been a student of integral theory and practice since 1996. Corey is also a professional woodworker, and many of his artworks can be found in his VisionLogix art gallery.
Comments
Lovely Corey – Thank you for this mornings inspiration!
Corey, I always appreciate your inspiring messages. I’m also grateful for those that are in print, since I will never be able to hear those on the podcast, being profoundly deaf. Thank you.