The most powerful part of our being, and the most power part of why we are who we are is love. Without love, we are like a boat in the water lacking oars. We can be jostled around aimlessly.
This is a high bar to live by. Jesus tells us to love God and love our neighbor. Can we do this without reservation? We cannot say we love God and then say that we do not love our neighbor. Let me be stronger. If we feel hate in our hearts for anyone, and I mean anyone, we cannot say that we love God.
This is also a very necessary quality in all humans, especially in the political climates that permeate the world today. We cannot allow hate to fill the world like it did in the 1930s which created the most devastating war in the history of mankind.
Love is who we are; we are not truly alive if we don’t love. If we hate anyone, there can be no love in our hearts, and therefore, our lives. We cannot mislead ourselves by thinking otherwise. We cannot be true to ourselves without love.
Human culture can be a very confusing, and, as we have experienced, very violent; but, we cannot let these outside forces take the love from our hearts. We will only proceed to our own spiritual demise by allowing events to take over our ability to love one another. We can disagree, and even dislike, things that are occurring around us; we also cannot ignore them. What we can do is to put them in the proper prospective. Chances are, what we experience in the greater world does not directly affect our lives. We can work to prevent the hatred from entering our community, by continually looking at people as children of God, not as strangers to be disliked because they are not like us. As god created us, he created them also. We must keep our faith foremost in our hearts to do this.
When we keep love alive, we keep hope alive. Where there is hope, there is the ability to help lift others from their conditions. This means that we bring life to those who have been forgotten. This is not possible without love. This life based on love gives us strength and the courage to bring God’s love to those society shuns.
This poem is from my heart to all my friends:
My Love
An inner wellspring
Of primal intimacy
Only God and I can feel
But you and others may share
In the first letter of John, we are told quite bluntly that those who say they love God but hate their brothers or sisters are liars. Some of them may be. But in the light of what we know about modern psychology, I think it better to say that their understanding of love is incomplete.
Can we love? Can we be pure in our love, pure in our hearts? I pray so.
Meditating to Heal 