May blessings of Love be with you, dear friends! As our hearts are emptied, we are more and more capable of love. Oh, that we would enter into the unquenchable Fire of longing and truly live! Let LOVE inrease on earth and let it begin with each one of us.
We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes... Our homesickness is alleviated only by love, the love that transcends our self-centeredness, our pettiness... When we are truly in love, not in the sense of romantic, erotic love, but in the sense of God's love for all that the Power of Love created, then our homesickness is alleviated. When we are in love we are no longer homesick, for Love is home.
Tranquility
is a little child asleep,
a clear, calm sky,
the softly falling snow;
the space between all heartbeats
in which love
reminds the anxious heart:
"Be still and know."
Coming from Love is coming from the heart, the heart of the One Spirit within, and touching other hearts in unity of God's purpose and peace. Loving yourself is the first step home; loving all else is the way, the path; and being Love is the journey's end; for once you become that which you are -- LOVE -- you shall truly be Home.
We human beings are here to help each other, to support each other, to love each other. We cannot be fully human if we are isolated and alone. But to share our love, always we must first love ourselves. It may sound simple, but to live by this principle is at times not easy. Just the same, if we forget to care for our own being, then how can we ever hope to assist others? Only when we come from our own living center can we give our greatest gift to the world.
Contact with the Divine Beloved is never complete until some other human being feels more loved and cherished as a result of its contact. Further, as all who have ever communed with the Beloved have discovered, the more deeply you encounter the Divine Lover, the more sensitively you feel the agony of the world; the more you are called to care more, feel more and think more deeply about decay in the social and moral order. You live in a state of radical empathy with all those in need. You are transparent to the agony of the world. Together with the Beloved, you must reach out to allay this suffering, or to do what you can in the light of the perspective of grace and the energy of spiritual partnership.
I believe in the sun even when it is not shining.
I believe in love even when I do not feel it.
I believe in God even when God is silent.
Creation may be seen as a continuing, dynamic process guided by incomprehensible LOVE.
If your heart is not full of Love, you won't see love anywhere. But if your heart is soaked with the Presence of Love, you will recognize that presence. Where we come together in very simple ways, we sense the presence. Where people are vulnerable together in a quiet way, there is real strength. That is where the realm of LOVE is shaped.
For inasmuch as this flame is a flame of the Divine Life, it wounds the soul with the tenderness of the life of God; and so deeply ... does it wound it and fill it with tenderness that causes it to melt in love, so that there may be fulfilled in it that which came to pass in the Bride in the Song of Songs; she conceived such great tenderness that she melted away.
Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one "object" of love... If I truly love one person, I love all persons, I love the world. I must be able to say, "I love in you everybody. I love through you the world, I love in you also myself."
Adri told us, "LOVING IS NOTHING WITHOUT TRUTH."
I think we really understood, for the first time, how different our lives -- and the world -- would be if we could all operate out of a state of truth and love. Within a loving context it becomes safe to reveal one's own truth. In retrospect we could see that suppressing truth limited our ability to love one another. And when we limit our truth, we limit our lives.
Spiritual understanding centers on the acceptance of a divine truth, which gradually reveals itself, rising on the horizon of the mind till it pervades all. If the mind and its reactions are brought into willing obedience to that truth, the divine truth continues to permeate the mind even more and the mind develops with it endlessly... It is we who must yield to the love of God so that our minds may be open to the divine truth.
Who longs for peace must first clear any battlefield within the heart, then sow there seeds of love.
Ecstatic love for God -- heart and mind melted by passionate longing for Truth -- is the one essential factor in the process of awakening. Divine Presence, however one may understand and experience it, exists in and through all conscious beings... Merged in motiveless love, one experiences every moment the tremendous natural attraction of Divine Presence. This Presence is the inner guidance that we feel flowing through us as conscience, intellect, intuition, sense perception, and longing. Divine Presence alone generates the yearning of our heart, the seeking of our mind, the ease of our body, the illumination of our soul.