The most powerful, most needed,
and most essential teaching is always Love.
Love is our foundation and our destiny.
It is where we come from and where we’re headed.
“So faith, hope, and love remain,
but the greatest of these is love”.
My hope, whenever I speak or write,
is to help clear away the impediments
to receiving, allowing, trusting,
and participating in a foundational Love.
Love is who you are.
When you don’t live according to love,
you are outside of being.
You’re basically not real or true to yourself.
When you love, you are acting according to
your deepest being, your deepest truth.
You are operating according to your dignity.
For a simple description
of the kind of love I am talking about,
let’s just use the word outflowing.
All I can do is remind you of
what you already know
deep within your True Self
and invite you to
live connected to this Source.
“God is love,
and whoever remains in love,
remains in God and God in them”.
We were created
in the very “image and likeness” of God -
who sets the highest bar
for this kind of outflowing love.
Out of this generative
and infinitely flowing relationship,
all of creation takes form,
mirroring its Creator
in its deepest identity.
If this is true,
then our family of origin is divine.
It is saying
that we were created by a loving God
to also be love in the world.
Our core is original blessing,
not original sin.
Our starting point is “very good”
If the beginning is right,
the rest is made considerably easier,
because we know and can trust
the clear direction of our life’s tangent.
We must all overcome
the illusion of separateness.
It is the primary task of religion -
to communicate not worthiness but union,
to reconnect people to their original identity.
God’s job description is to draw us back
into primal and intimate relationship with Him.
Henceforth, all our moral behavior
is simply “the imitation of God.”
And what does God do?
God does what God is: Love.
God does not love you if and when you change.
God loves you so that you can change!
- Adapted from Richard Rohr: Essential Teachings on Love, ed. Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Orbis Books: 2018), v, 12-13, 65-66.) via Facebook Post of Bengt Erik Stendlert
wa Huwal Ghafurul Wadud
And God is the Forgiving,
the Loving.
- The Qur'an, Al-Buruj, 85:14
# Related: Love in the Holy Quran (Download free as PDF via Tafsir.com)
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