love

The abundant well of spiritual longing

Spiritual longing is a sort of loneliness for an unknown yet deeply perceived presence. Some call the presence God; some call it peace; some call it consciousness; some call it Love. It's source rests in the well of our own hearts. When we slow down, quiet the mind, and allow ourselves to feel hungry for something that we do not understand, we are dipping into the abundant well of spiritual longing. If we want to open to doors to life's love and God's peace, we have to learn how to fearlessly explore the full terrain of our human longing.

Love has given humans very real gifts

Love has given humans very real gifts. The chief one is the divine indwelling, God's own presence within us, sustaining us by this creative action and embracing us, or trying to heal or transform us through the redeeming love that is distinctively motherly. As the spiritual journey progresses, one comes face to face with the divine presence.

February 2004 (Vol. XVII, No. 2)

Warm loving greetings from the northern freeze! We live so we may learn to love; we love so we may learn to live. Mutual reciprocity. Delve into the Eternal Silence deep within your heart, home of the Divine Guest. There you will find Love and learn lessons of living. Blessed be!

Yes we are here to love

Terry Tempest Williams Leap
In the presence of the Ancient Ones, we deliver new vows in whispers by the authority of our own remembered hearts. Standing before these Elders of Time, we entrust ourselves to each other. Our vows are simple, spontaneous. "Yes, we are here to love. Yes, we are here to experience both shadow and light, forgiveness and joy. We return to each other, rejoined. Together we will love this beautiful, broken world of which we are a part."

What counted was how well we loved

Neil Henry Pearl's Secret

Both of our families had ben crippled to some degree by prejudice, personal trauma, and tragedy, but in the most important ways both ranches had endured. So it wasn't what we did for a living that counted, nor what kind of china we dined on, nor what our houses looked like. Nor, in this one sense, did our skin color even matter very much. What counted most through the generations far more than any other factor, was how we treated those we loved and how well we loved That seemed the transcendent lesson or moral my search had revealed

Love is our shared truth

Anonymous The Museum of World Religions in Taiwan

Love is our shared truth.
Peace is our eternal hope.

The abundant well of spiritual longing

Elizabeth Lesser The Seeker's Guide
Spiritual longing is a sort of loneliness for an unknown yet deeply perceived presence. Some call the presence God; some call it peace; some call it consciousness; some call it Love. It's source rests in the well of our own hearts. When we slow down, quiet the mind, and allow ourselves to feel hungry for something that we do not understand, we are dipping into the abundant well of spiritual longing. If we want to open to doors to life's love and God's peace, we have to learn how to fearlessly explore the full terrain of our human longing.

Love begets love

Nicki V. Vandergrift Meditations with Merton

Love begets love. Like a wave, the love of an individual can evoke compassion in another. The active display of concern warms the many hearts who witness it. The love spreads for many to see. Compassion hen generates community. Others are brought into the swirling dynamic of God's revelation of care. The witness to love can inspire others to carry the tide of concern further.

To feel something as real in the measure of its full reality is to love

Unknown
To feel something as real in the measure of its full reality is to love. It is love which awakens us to the reality of ourselves, to the reality of others, to the reality of the world, and o the reality of God.

How happy are you just being in love

Anonymous
How happy you are when you practice silent contemplation filled with wisdom and love! How happy you are when you sit, just being in love!

Love matters

Robert S. Ellwood

Love matters. It matters more than anything else in the world. Yet is is very easy. All you have to do is be who you really are; for you are made of love and made to love because of what you are: an interconnected part of a whole whose life and fiber is love.

The important thing

St. Teresa of Avila
The important thing is not to think much but to love much. So do that which bestirs you to love.

Love losing itself and finding itself

Bede Griffiths Return the Center

Love giving itself, losing itself and finding itself in love, and Love returning to itself, giving itself back in love — this is the eternal pattern of the universe. The nucleus throws out its protons and electrons and they circle round it, held by the attraction of Love. Beyond the molecules and atoms, beyond the protons and electrons, there is an energy, a force of life, continually welling up from the abyss of being in god, continually springing up into the light of the Word, continually flowing back to it source in the bliss of love.

Love is that fire that does not destroy

Don Miguel Ruiz
Love is the opposite of fear. Love is that fire that does not destroy, whereas fear is the fire that burns everything it touches.

Love has given humans very real gifts

Thomas Keating

Love has given humans very real gifts. The chief one is the divine indwelling, God's own presence within us, sustaining us by this creative action and embracing us, or trying to heal or transform us through the redeeming love that is distinctively motherly. As the spiritual journey progresses, one comes face to face with the divine presence.

If you would but practice loving

Hilarion Threshold

If you would but practice loving, you would make yourself into a fountain of healing energy where others could drink the balm that heals the pain of the soul. For it is love, only love, that can heal all levels of the human being. Remember also that the earth being needs your love. Not only is the earth a living, thinking, feeling entity like yourself, but she needs the love and the thoughts of the human race in these dark years as she has never before needed anything. You can be among the growing number who realize the mother planet is suffering. In your prayers, and in your meditation, send her your love and your thoughts. The darkness of her days can be lifted by the love of the race she has nurtured since its inception.

Encircle me

Anonymous Celtic Prayer

Encircle me
Enfold me
Entrance me
With Thy peace
That I may pray
and love Thee well.

Encircle me
Embolden me
Enhance me
With Thy power
That I may ever
do Thy will.

How many people can you love?

Brian Andreas Traveling Light

How many people can you love
before it's too much, she said.

and I said I didn't think
there was any real limit

as long as you didn't care
if they loved you back.

This is an intentional life enhancing universe with LOVE as its vital force

John Broomfield Other Ways of Knowing
Take heart! Humanity is wise and, in its rich diversity, possessed of vast reservoirs of creativity, inspiration, and spiritual energy. Be of good cheer. For this is an intentional, life enhancing universe with LOVE as its vital force.

Seek refuge in inner silence

Anonymous Persian Wisdom

Seek refuge in inner silence,
free your thoughts from
the external world and you will feel
the rays of God's goodness and love
pouring over you and the universe.

What counted was how well we loved

Both of our families had ben crippled to some degree by prejudice, personal trauma, and tragedy, but in the most important ways both ranches had endured. So it wasn't what we did for a living that counted, nor what kind of china we dined on, nor what our houses looked like. Nor, in this one sense, did our skin color even matter very much. What counted most through the generations far more than any other factor, was how we treated those we loved and how well we loved That seemed the transcendent lesson or moral my search had revealed

February 2003 (Vol. XVI, No. 2)

BLESSINGS and WARM WISHES to ech FOS around the world! How deeply we long to love and to be loved by the unknown Mystery! May we each afirm Divine Love in the silence of our own hearts, in the anctuary of our Inner Chapel, and in the freedom of solitude. May we bask in this LOE and raiate LOVE out to the world trusing it will make a difference to someone, somewhere.

Love is the voice under all silences

e. e. cummings
Love is the voice under all silences, The hope which has no opposite in fear.

Instead of looking to other humans for love

Don Miguil Ruiz

Instead of looking to other humans for love, we need to align with our own love, because it's not the love of other humans that will make us happy. What will make us happy is the love we feel for every human, the love we feel for God, for all creation. When the love comes from someone else, we can love it and it's nice; but when we feel our own love, it's the best thing that can happen to us. We live in heave, we live in bliss. Open your heart and love unconditionally — not because you want love in return, and not because you want to control someone. That is false love. When you love with no conditions you transcend the dream of fear and become aligned with divine spirit, the love of God, which is love coming from you. That love is LIFE, and just like the sun, it is shining all the time.

Until love's work is done

Susan Sherard

Heaven will not leave us alone.
Heaven will continue to come to earth
Until heaven and earth are one.
Heaven will not leave us alone until
Love's work is done.

Love is, and may proceed from wherever you are

Jennifer Lash On Pilgrimage
Every night I had a sense to consciously pitch the tent of my being in a definite place of "unknowing." Bang in the pegs saying, I do not know anything. Inside the tent it might be dark, or maybe there were spins of moonlight. But in there, somehow or other, you know there is love. Love is, and may proceed from wherever you are, without you knowing anything very much.

Love all that has been created by God

Fedor Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov

Love all that has been created by God, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf and every ray of light. Love the beasts and the bids, love the plants, love every separate fragment. If you love each separate fragment, you will understand he mystery of the whole resting in God. When you perceive this, your understanding of this mystery will grow from day to day until you come to love the whole world with a love that includes everything, excluding nothing.

Let yourself be silently drawn

Rumi

Let yourself be silently drawn,
by the strong pull
of what you really love.

The important thing is to allow love into one's life

Oonagh Shanley-Toffolo The Voice of Silence

The important thing is to allow love into one's life, to turn towards it. Then, if one love dies, another will take its place — whether human or Divine in form. As my friend, Annabella, once said, "I have passed my whole life being in love, in love with nature, in love with animals, in love with life, and I celebrate each springtime as a miracle." When we build a relationship, the ACT of turning the heart towards the beloved, with recognition, waters the root of love. Then one an receive its fruits: peace, joy, silence, contentment.

To love is to be vulnerable

Verna J. Dozier The Dream of God

Creation is an act of love ... and, to love is to be vulnerable. The story of creation bears that fact out. The lover seeks the beloved. The lover is not complete without the beloved. Human beings are most fully human when they realize that they are creatures and give joyful response to the Creator. All that we are and all that we have comes from God; we are part of God's dream for a good creation using our freedom to do God's will.

Look with the eyes of love

Evelyn Underhill Practical Mysticism

To "look with the eyes of love" seems a vague and sentimental recommendation; yet the whole art of spiritual communion is summed in it, and exact and important results flow from this exercise. The attitude which it involves is an attitude of complete humility and of receptiveness, without criticism, without clever analysis of the thing seen... The doors of perception are cleansed, and everything appears as it is. The disfigurating results of hate, rivalry, prejudice vanish away. Into that silent place to which recollection has brought you — new music, new color, new light are poured from the outward world.

Love has conquered by fear

Kathleen A. Brehony After the Darkest Hour
I am the one who needs to give thanks for the opportunity that I had to be a part of this miracle. It's enough to know that because of my kidney, my sister has a new lease on life; an opportunity to enjoy her young marriage, to care for her young son. Yes, I give thanks, for Love has conquered by fear.

Love is the lodestone of life

Ernest Holmes

Love is the lodestone of life, the great and supreme reality... the highest gift of heaven, the greatest good on earth, the treasure of all our search. While hate kills, love renews and invigorates. As love is the greatest healing power, no one feels whole without it. Love need not be confined to only a few, but can be extended to many without losing the love of a few. In fact, when love becomes more complete it will take in a large and larger territory and in doing so experience a greater degree of livingness.

For silence is not God, nor speaking

Anonymous The Cloud of Unknowing
For silence is not God, nor speaking; fasting is not God, nor eating; solitude is not God, nor company; nor any other pair of opposites. God is hidden between them and cannot be found by anything your soul does, but only by the love of your heart. God cannot be known by reason, nor by thought, caught, or sought by understanding. But God can be love and chosen by the true, loving will of your heart.

Love includes the world and time as a pregnant woman includes her child

Wendell Berry Jaber Crow
Love, sooner or later, forces us out of time. It does not accept limit. Of all that we feel and do, all the virtues and all the sins, love alone crowds us at last over the edge of the world. For love is not explainable or even justifiable. Love itself is the justifier. We do not make it. If it did not happen to us, we could not imagine it. Love includes the world and time as a pregnant woman includes her child whose wrongs she will suffer and forgive. Love is in the world but is not altogether of it. It is of eternity. It takes us there when it most holds us here.

There is no limit to our capacity love

Eknath Easwaran A More Ardent Fire

There is no limit to our capacity love. We can never be satisfied by loving just one person here and another there. Our need is to love completely, universally, without reservations — in other words, to become love itself. It can take our breath away to glimpse the vastness of such love.

Love is a verb

Anonymous

Love is a verb ... not a noun.

The important thing is to allow love into one's life

The important thing is to allow love into one's life, to turn towards it. Then, if one love dies, another will take its place — whether human or Divine in form. As my friend, Annabella, once said, "I have passed my whole life being in love, in love with nature, in love with animals, in love with life, and I celebrate each springtime as a miracle." When we build a relationship, the ACT of turning the heart towards the beloved, with recognition, waters the root of love. Then one an receive its fruits: peace, joy, silence, contentment.

Until love's work is done

Heaven will not leave us alone.
Heaven will continue to come to earth
Until heaven and earth are one.
Heaven will not leave us alone until
Love's work is done.

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