Saying For Today: Why, then, cling to that less than Love, even in devotion to Love?
LOTUS OF THE HEART
Everyone is Welcome Here
Living in Love beyond Beliefs
*Photos by Di, La Belle Rose, Flickr
Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. It is, in fact, the one thing that still stands when all else has fallen.
*I Corinthians 13.7-8a, JB Phillips New Testament
An aged man, an Abba who had served God many years in the desert, prayed, "Lord, let me know if I have pleased you." He saw an angel. The angel spoke, "You have not become like the gardener in the city." The Abba marvelled, saying, "I will go off to the city to see both him and what it is that he does that surpasses all my work and toil of all these years."
He walked to the city and asked the gardener about his way of life. When they were getting ready to eat in the evening, the Abba heard people singing in the streets disreputable songs. He asked the gardener, "Brother, wanting as you do to live as pleases God, how do you remain in this place and not be troubled when you hear them singing these songs?"
The gardener replied, "I tell you, Abba, I have never been troubled or scandalized." When he heard this, the aged Abba spoke, "What, then, do you think in your heart when you hear these things?" He replied, "That they are all going into the Kingdom of God."
When the Abba heard this, he marveled. The Abba said, "This is the spiritual practice surpassing my labour of all these years."
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Love Itself transcends all our thoughts of heaven and hell, chosen and unchosen, right and wrong. This Love is before and is after all things, all talk, all thought. All thought of Love is to a degree, more or less, a remove from Love. Why not simply affirm Love, and let Love be Love apart from any idea, even what you might esteem the best of ideas? Is not the nakedness of Love most seen apart from the garb of thought and talk? Is that not what Silence initiates us into? Why, then, cling to that less than Love, even in devotion to Love?
