I have been thinking a great deal about love lately, about its centrality in the Course, and about how easily we forget that centrality. We Course students talk a lot about forgiveness, but much less, it seems to me, about love. I think that is probably because the dominant model out there (in my view) is that the Course is about attaining peace, and forgiveness clearly looks like a strategy for reaching peace. And it is. But it is also a strategy for reaching love. It is hard to love while you are smoldering with resentment. And isn’t that the whole point of the Course, to “remove the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence”?
Part of my focus on love has been prompted by a class I teach locally on the historical Jesus. There, we have been concentrating on an incredibly powerful saying from the Sayings Gospel Q (the source of much of the teaching in Matthew and Luke): “Love your enemies, and pray for those persecuting you, so that you may become sons of your Father, for he raises his sun on bad and good and rains on the just and unjust.”
I’ve been applying that specifically: “I love my ‘enemy’ [name] and pray for his happiness, so that I may live as a son of my Father, for he raises his sun on bad and good and rains on the just and unjust.” The meaning is unmistakable: If I want to really claim my place as a Son of God, the way I do that is to love as He loves. And how does He love? He loves indiscriminately. He loves both sides of the fence. He loves those who consider Him their enemy just as much as He loves His most devoted servants. He just loves.
I have a lot of images in my mind of being like God or in harmony with God, and loving like God loves is one of them, but it generally has a kind of peripheral, “extra credit” feeling to it: “Well, yeah, we should love that way. That’s a great thing. But it’s one of those extreme, Mother Teresa things, isn’t it? I mean, who can do that? Therefore, in the meantime, I’ll focus on the other ways of being like God.”
I think most of us are in denial about the centrality of love. The Course says that our core problem is guilt, and isn’t guilt just another way of talking about the pain we feel over our failure to love? I have to say that I can really identify with that. In a typical day, my mind is focused on all sorts of mundane details. But when I stand back from those details and look at the big picture, I find to my dismay that I feel guilty about all of my relationships, without exception. And that guilt is not mainly about specific things. At root, it is simply about the failure to adequately love. I suspect I am not alone in this. Yet I go about each day as if this failure to love is a non-issue, while I attend to more pressing matters.
So lately I have been taking small steps to remedy this denial. The other day I did Lesson 127, “There is no love but God’s.” I did the longer exercise with each person I ran into (until about mid-afternoon when I got caught up in kids and meal preparation and lost track). Here is what I did:
I bless you brother with the Love of God (tried to feel God’s unconditional love toward that person), which I would share with you (had a feeling of that love going from me to that person so that now we both shared it). For I would learn the joyous lesson that there is no love but God’s (paused to savor the idea that unconditional love is the only love there is), and yours (paused to realize that this other person was also a font of God’s Love), and mine (that I too have this same Love in me), and everyone’s (imagined this Love being a universal reality living in everyone’s heart).
It ended up being a really good day due to that practice. I felt lifted into a better place. I also notice that as soon as I take my focus off this theme, it’s gone. It flies off to the hills. But I feel it is so absolutely central that I need to keep putting my attention there, until even when I’m not thinking about it, it stays with me.
