The beginning of love
A quote from Thomas Merton has been well received:-
[i]The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
[/i]
I muse upon such things. This while slurping cappuccino at Costa's, smashing another level of Candy Crush Soda Saga, being mauled by my two grandchildren and washing my dear wife's feet (as she cannot reach down to them without pain) All part of what some call the "rich tapestry of life", richer for me than for many others. For which I am grateful.
The [b]beginning[/b] of love. Love has no end and in fact, speaking literally, my own trust/faith is that it has no beginning. Love is why there is [i]something[/i] rather than nothing, and as the great Christian mystic Meister Eckhart has said:-
[i]Love has no why[/i]
Which points to the incomprehensible God beyond all images. Or as is said in the east, "empty/void" which is dismissed as nihilism by the ignorant.
Yet love for us finite creatures must have a beginning in time. This is where I end up disputing with some Christians who insist that love's beginning can only be through "Jesus". The "only way". Mention the Universal Christ to such and it is denounced as "modernism", "apostacy" or New Age mumbo jumbo. In fact the Universal Christ is the heart of the Gospel.
Love can begin [i]anywhere[/i], at any time. With the pure acceptance spoken of in the words of Merton, whose fidelity to Christ is unquestionable. [i]Anywhere[/i] at all, in infinite ways, whenever we accept another, the "stranger", without terms or conditions.
It takes two to tango, obviously. As William Blake has said:-
[i]Mutual forgivenes of each vice opens the gates of paradise[/i]
Or....."you're not OK, I'm not OK. But that's OK."
In the Buddhist Faith is a story of the Buddha descending into one of the many lurid Buddhist hells. He holds a lamp and by it's light those there, for the very first time, see that there are others there with them... "Ah! There are others besides myself!" The beginning of the moral sense and of so much more. Of relationship, inter-being, the fabric of Reality-as-is in which we "live and move and have our being."
To finish (gasps of relief all around), simply to pre-empt possible objections by some here who follow Protestant Reform Theology in its more literalist/fundamentalist form....
"I am the way, the truth and life. No one comes to the Father but by me"
According to Eastern Orthodox theology and Biblical hermenuetics, according to mainstream interpretation, the one who speaks is the Logos, the Universal Christ.
Which then enables faith to understand the words of Eckhart:-
[i]They do him wrong to understand God in just one particular way - they end with the way rather than God[/i]
[i]The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
[/i]
I muse upon such things. This while slurping cappuccino at Costa's, smashing another level of Candy Crush Soda Saga, being mauled by my two grandchildren and washing my dear wife's feet (as she cannot reach down to them without pain) All part of what some call the "rich tapestry of life", richer for me than for many others. For which I am grateful.
The [b]beginning[/b] of love. Love has no end and in fact, speaking literally, my own trust/faith is that it has no beginning. Love is why there is [i]something[/i] rather than nothing, and as the great Christian mystic Meister Eckhart has said:-
[i]Love has no why[/i]
Which points to the incomprehensible God beyond all images. Or as is said in the east, "empty/void" which is dismissed as nihilism by the ignorant.
Yet love for us finite creatures must have a beginning in time. This is where I end up disputing with some Christians who insist that love's beginning can only be through "Jesus". The "only way". Mention the Universal Christ to such and it is denounced as "modernism", "apostacy" or New Age mumbo jumbo. In fact the Universal Christ is the heart of the Gospel.
Love can begin [i]anywhere[/i], at any time. With the pure acceptance spoken of in the words of Merton, whose fidelity to Christ is unquestionable. [i]Anywhere[/i] at all, in infinite ways, whenever we accept another, the "stranger", without terms or conditions.
It takes two to tango, obviously. As William Blake has said:-
[i]Mutual forgivenes of each vice opens the gates of paradise[/i]
Or....."you're not OK, I'm not OK. But that's OK."
In the Buddhist Faith is a story of the Buddha descending into one of the many lurid Buddhist hells. He holds a lamp and by it's light those there, for the very first time, see that there are others there with them... "Ah! There are others besides myself!" The beginning of the moral sense and of so much more. Of relationship, inter-being, the fabric of Reality-as-is in which we "live and move and have our being."
To finish (gasps of relief all around), simply to pre-empt possible objections by some here who follow Protestant Reform Theology in its more literalist/fundamentalist form....
"I am the way, the truth and life. No one comes to the Father but by me"
According to Eastern Orthodox theology and Biblical hermenuetics, according to mainstream interpretation, the one who speaks is the Logos, the Universal Christ.
Which then enables faith to understand the words of Eckhart:-
[i]They do him wrong to understand God in just one particular way - they end with the way rather than God[/i]
