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And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
*I Corinthians 13.13, NRSV
The Christian belief about God ... is not primarily belief in the personal Creator, but the conviction that this creative God is love.
*W. R. Matthews. God in Christian Experience.
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First, to Matthews statement above... There is much un-loving in all world faiths. I choose my own faith for the statement of a universal principle.
If, indeed, the fundamental fact of God is God is love, all in the Christian faith not loving in nature, regardless of how "orthodox" or not, is not reflecting the nature of God, is not Christian-and we need to be honest about such matters, or we forfeit the respect of others and our own self-respect.
Too much of this turning the other cheek from religious lies occurs in religion generally.
Christ spirituality is Loving. Great mystics of world faiths have confirmed that to be one with God means the mystery that lover, love, and beloved is a Unity.
Then, in my experience, I "see" that the unity in those three is loving. God is Loving; the timeless, dimensionless act of loving.
Then, how do you connect with God? Let us look at this in very simply terms, but eternally and universally true:
1) Being the lover.
We experience ourselves as the actor, as person extending outward to touch another person. When we do so, we are loving, and we do not have to have any "feelings" of love for the one whom we love. Literally, Loving, or the Essence of Love, is loving the essence of the other through your essence.
2) Being the loved.
We receive love. This challenges many of us greatly, for we have been taught often that receiving love is inferior to giving love, or that to feel worthy of it and, thus, want it, is selfish.
Truly, not to want love, to feel it selfish, is selfish. To resist true love is to say "No" to Loving - God - who loves through the lover. Many persons are caught in the knot of wanting love desperately and resisting love mightily. How to get out of the knot is the question - this happens in the harmony of lover, love, and loving.
See, in the above two experiences, love is the connection, as though in the gap between giving and receiving. This love is, however, the Divine Spirit. You cannot not be one with God in the connection of love. You are in the "gap" by either giving or receiving lovingly. You are in the unity of Loving.
The One acting through all of this is Loving. Loving is the Inspiration of the sharing of love in giving and receiving.
Now, let us realize we can be both actor and receiver in the act of loving. Here, we are loving ourselves. This loving of self is the same as the love one shares with or receives from another other. Often the journey of mediation is a learning to love the self, so the self can give and receive maturely with others.
At a time when I was very connected with Christ Consciousness, I went into retreat. I sat daily, for about an hour, with a dear lady who was a counselor-spiritual guide. On the third day she said, "Brian, in any church you serve you will have big problems with opposition." She noted, "Your love, which I have witnessed these few days, is so strong that persons will resist that."
This alerted me to the oddity that Love is so challenging to our frightened ego-personality. We might think, "Oh, if I love very much, everyone will love me likewise." No. Love challenges and dismantles the self-system and transforms the material of self-consciousness into Love Itself.
So, meditation challenges the meditator. When I open to the True Self, Who I Am in Christ, I open to Love. The self-system faces the attraction and felt-threat of Love.
Love is not present just to comfort me, which is often a blessing in meditation. Love loves me to rearrange the self-system, with all its energies, into another Likeness.
I close, today, with a reading on the use of meditation in this inner transformation in Loving...
The truly religious understanding of man is not found in terms of reward and punishment, but in terms of wholeness and division. The supreme religious insight of East and West is that all our alienations are resolved, and all our thinking and feeling powers united, in the heart ...
The holy men of the Orthodox Church see the essential task of the Christian life as being to restore this unity to man with a mind and heart integrated through prayer. The mantra provides this integrating power. It is like a harmonic that we sound in the depths of our spirit, bringing us to an ever-deepening sense of our own wholeness and central harmony. It leads us to the source of this harmony, to our centre, rather as a radar bleep leads an aircraft home through thick fog. It also rearranges us, in the sense that it brings all our powers and faculties into line with each other just as a magnet drawn over iron filings pulls them into their proper force field.
*John Main. Word into Silence.
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*Charitable contributions would be appreciated to assist Brian in continuing his ministry. For contributions, contact Brian at barukhattah@embarqmail.com .
*Brian's book of spiritual love poetry, An Ache for Union: Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major booksellers or the Cokesbury on-line store, cokesbury.com .
*Brian K. Wilcox, a United Methodist Pastor, lives in Southwest Florida. He is a vowed member of Greenbough House of Prayer, a contemplative Christian community in South Georgia. He lives a contemplative life and seeks to inspire others to enjoy a more intimate relationship with Christ. Brian advocates for a spiritually-focused, experiential Christianity and renewal of the Church through addressing the deeper spiritual needs and longings of persons.
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