“I’ve been play it safe, hiding behind words, but the truth is I love God,” a woman of my acquaintance recently declared.Another friend looked thoughtful then said, “Since God is in you, you can only love God as much as you love yourself.”
Hmmmm.
I struggle to love my “self” – this little, challenged, earthy, personality called “Elena” - yet still experience an all-encompassing sense of love with… or through… or in “God.” But do I love God?
When I use the laughably inadequate, short hand expression “God,” I refer to an indescribably delicious, joy-bright-dancing-light glory-shout-alleluia core-still-certainty of being. This energy has the taste/feel/color/sensation of unlimited, unconditional “love.” And this love energy flows between, around and through all beings.
The whole energy field, “God,” is love, and that fills and surrounds each of us (and all other things). In fact despite appearances, all existence is a continuous field of that. Yet that - “God” - extends far beyond material existence.
From one view, that is an undifferentiated unity so the appearance of separate selves must be an illusion. Not nothing, yet without “things” - because in unity, there can be no selves. Because in unity there is just one - no “not-one.”
But from another view there are selves, or loci of identity, in the field. These selves, these loci, have identity because of their relationships to each other. To have an “I” means having a “not-I,” a “you.” Only relationship with you creates the “not-I” that confers my identity because only in relationship with you have I one characteristic and not another.
Without “you,” “I” truly can’t exist. Without you I also can’t love because “to love” I need a "you" from which and to which love energy flows. In relationship we can love, while our relationship creates our selves.
The thing is, I’m not sure I “love” God.
God is love. When I touch that (in me or outside me), I dwell in love. In fact, I am punch-drunk, exuberantly, assuredly, full-to-overflowing with love. I feel love flow in, through and all around me. This feeling of love escalates and clarifies in the presence of other selves that radiate love energy more unreservedly than I do.
One of those selves is Jesus. Embarrassing, but true. I love Jesus. And Jesus is God just as I am God and you are God and this chair is God - except he’s a lot less blurry. In that sense, I love God.
Still, do I love God, the field, itself?
Hmmmmmm.
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