What is love? In this season, it might be good to ask.
The most notable feature of love is that it doesn't want anything. It's not trying to change you or get you to be better or some kind of improved model. It's not waiting until you accomplish something or other.
Because true love doesn't want anything. It doesn't want anything because it's already full. The greatest privilege this world has to offer is to feel love. Even greater than to feel loved or be loved is to feel loving towards...
Towards what? Ah, there's the thing. If we say I love this and this, but not that, then love has not reached its true depth yet. Because if we leave anything out, then some part of our heart is still rejecting.
Jesus addressed this point with perhaps more eloquence than anyone else. He said that if we just love those who love us, that's good, but we haven't really accomplished much yet because that's what everybody does.
He said that where our hearts really learn to open is when we accept the unacceptable in life, the ugly, the unwanted, the left-out.
And of course, Jesus meant not just others and the world but also those parts of ourselves that we don't want to acknowledge or accept. If we accept others, we'll accept the world too because it's just our own mirror.
And Jesus referred to divine love when he talked about the mysterious infinite, "who makes his sun to shine upon the just and the unjust, and sends his healing rain to saint and sinner alike."
In modern terms, we might say that divine love doesn't discriminate. It doesn't need to know who you are first, or what your status is in the world. It doesn't care. The nature of love is that it just loves, it doesn't need to know anything first.
True love is unconditional. It has no conditions. It doesn't need you to act in a certain way before the love is there. It loves, in truth, because it can't help it. It's overflowing with love, and there's simply no way, no means, no idea of how to leave anything out or make some kind of condition first.
This entire world is just the infinite in disguise. Do you want to meet God? Just look at whatever's in front of you. You're meeting the eternal all the time, in fact there's never been a moment in your life when you haven't been meeting the ungraspable. It's right in front of you. It is you. It's everything.
So in truth, when we love others and this world and ourselves, it's the infinite loving itself, over and over. Every act of love is the love of the infinite. The least act of kindness is the eternal itself acting, through this human circuitry that we think of as somebody.
But it's all the same thing. It's always the non-locatable, acting and loving and appreciating itself, grateful for itself, falling in love with itself, all over again, in our humble and grateful hearts.
—jim sloman, 12/15/00 for Dec 15
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