(Blog post from February 2021)
Someone I love recently asked me if I was “in love”; because Love seems to be a theme in so much of what I write about when the spirit moves me, in both my poetry and my prose. My answer was “Yes, I´m in love…with my life and with God“. Because, to me, God is (quite literally) Love, and it´s become impossible for me to write about one without the other. Both within my heart and within my consciousness, they are one-and-the-same thing. But I also appreciate that people who don´t share this belief, will naturally attempt to categorise any talk of Love into one of our human definitions of it.
Love is the one thing that every human-being searches for and craves, from our beginning to our end, whether consciously aware of it or not. But, as my post ´Sea of Love´ tried to convey, Love comes in so many forms – as does God – that it´s almost impossible to analyse, define or contain in a way that makes it fully understandable or known. Just as we will never be ´fully known´ by another human being during our lives here on Earth, neither will the mystery of God/Love be fully known to us during our “four score years and ten“.
It´s only when we truly open our minds and our hearts up to this unsettling realisation, and start to accept what the divine mystery is trying to teach us, in each of our indivdual life experiences, that we begin to learn how potentially limiting our human definitions of both God and Love can often be.
We begin to see why we will never find ´perfect love´ with a single human-being here on Earth (be that perfect parental, partner or friendship love); because none of us, no matter how well-intentioned, good or noble we try to be, is a living embodiment of divine Love. We need to widen our gaze and perception of Love to catch even fleeting glimpses of the true glory of God that lies dormant inside every one of us…including ourselves.
This personal revelation has helped me to accept that human limitations are´God-inspired´. Because it´s the limitations in one person, that highlights the strengths in another and, in doing so, it invites us to see how cooperation and inter-dependence can foster a sense of common purpose, mutual respect and shared Love; when we allow it to. I´ve learned that, when we keep looking outwards for love, we ignore the Love that is God-made-manifest within us, and we surrender all conscious ability to share that selfless, powerful and authentic love with others; which leaves us spiritually poorer as a result.
I´ve been personally fortunate in finding a Christian community here in Spain that has welcomed me both as a rarity (a passing pilgrim who chose to stay-a-while), and also as one-of-its-own (someone with trust and faith in the mystery that is God). Here I´ve learned about the immense healing power of simple human kindness shown to strangers, whilst also retaining my previous awareness that Love demands much more of us than “simply being kind”.
My last five years of pilgrimage and, in fact, all of my life experience to date, has shown me what Love ultimately demands: that we see and accept its presence in all that it sends our way. But I´ve also learned, by observing the lives of people around me, that being kind to each other and making the effort to live in harmony, makes the bearing of Love´s occasionally-painful-armour-piercing gifts, both more bearable and survivable at the same time.
In this community, and in other similar Christian communities, it´s called fellowship; a recognition of the truth that we are a Brotherhood of Man. It´s the manifestation, in day-to-day life, of the main message that Jesus conveyed and embodied during his lifetime: “Recognise and honour the ways in which God´s grace is compassionate to you; and – in your gratitude for that grace – feel, show and share that same compassion (or love) with those around you.
I know that it´s a tough call for people who haven´t grown up in mutually-supportive communities like these, and it´s a big ask for those who´ve grown up with trust issues and, through necessity, have learned to mistrust others and to count only on themselves. But it´s a ´lesson worth learning´ and a ´risk worth taking´ because, ultimately, every one of us learns that we are all held in the immensely-powerful hand (and live at the mercy and grace) of God´s unfathomable divine Love. A love that lives and grows when shared…and which becomes deformed, slowly withers and then dies when jealously-guarded, stifled or kept in isolation.
I see it symbolically as the Tree of Life referred to in Genesis (about which so little is written in the Bible and around which so much has been speculated), because it´s this feeling of fellowship that is the principle way in which we experience God´s divine Love in this life. And I see the Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil (or opinion, as I´ve come to call it) as the source of all division and suffering between us. If we over-indulge in fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil we run the risk of becoming opinionated, self-righteous and distant from the warm and loving, compassionate human beings we are capable of being…not just with family and close friends, but with the strangers we also encounter, day in and day out.
But when we choose to eat from the Tree of Life – consciously playing our part in building and sustaining a universal sense of brotherhood and fellowship, trying to look with the eyes of compassion at both ourselves and at those who enter our lives – we not only feel more alive and more worthy of love, we plant the seed of Love in others…and this is a seed with the power to bear fruit…from generation to generation to come.
La Casa de Paz 