Love As Daily Ritual

"The search for love is but the honest searching out of everything that interferes with love." - A Course in Miracles

You have heard this wisdom before. If you believe that you are a child of God, a microcosm of the macrocosm, an expression of the One, then you probably have a concept that your true nature, like God's, is love itself. There is of course a vast experiential chasm between a concept and an inner knowing; as between seeing your birth certificate and being hugged by your mother.

If love is truly at hand, closer than our very breath, then why do we not know and feel its embrace and hear its soothing voice? Just as infants do not recognize their parents until their perceptual abilities develop, we as children of God do not recognize the voice of Love despite its constant whispers in our hearts. Humanly, our faculty to hear the Voice of Love seems to depend on our need for certain circumstances to make Love's voice audible. If our partner does not return our loving advance, if children disobey or don't call, if our employer overlooks our accomplishments, we may experience a world seemingly devoid of love. If we experience difficulty or loss, we can subconsciously believe that we are unworthy, unloved, even unlovable. In such moments, the voice of fear drowns out Love's eternal message, and we're just not feeling the love.

Love is an eternal energy that cannot be limited or destroyed. Like its divine siblings of Truth, Wholeness, Harmony, Peace, and Joy, Love arises in abundance to meet our every need when the conditions are right. Paradoxically the right conditions for love to arise are no conditions at all. While we may prescribe the form love must take for us to hear its voice, Truth says otherwise. Truth asks us to give up form for content; give up the fickle for the constant, be willing to exchange the illusion of love for the real thing. As it says in A Course in Miracles, “When you want only love you will see nothing else....you will hear nothing else.”

I am a student of unconditional love. Every day I am asked to hear differently in order to penetrate the perceptual barrier that prevents me from hearing all that is being voiced in this world is either an expression of love or a call for love.

So in the final analysis it seems that love, stripped of externals, comes not by yearning for it, but by feeling from it. Since Love is what we come from, it's what we need to come from in our search. If we welcome love, it will be at our doorstep, whispering its reminder that it lives with us, in us and as us.

Jesus demonstrated that such love was not only real but achievable on earth as in heaven. He lived from love and it colored his world and everybody in it. All became to him as reflections of a heart so purified. Jesus was perhaps the greatest teacher of love because he never flinched in his commitment to it nor retreated from its mandate. So extraordinary was his demonstration of love that the world is still telling the story of a love so powerful, so enduring.

No matter what love lessons you have been told, or what we have come to believe about worthiness or earning love it's not too late to respond to an accurate retelling. We too live in this love. As offspring of Love itself, it can be no other way. Our work is not to defeat the enemies of love nor attract a Love apart from us. Our task is merely to awaken the Love within us. This is the truth about love that you won't find in a Valentine's Day card. A special day to celebrate the love of your life is a day you truly open your heart and become the vessel for God’s infinite love. How sweet it is.

Love and blessings,

Larry