Note: My blog post has been delayed because the days are troubled by denial and confused responses in the face of pandemic, and fighting in the streets. But it is a blog post about a power we have called Love. My illustration is of a tree which has endured untold hardships, twists and turns, but grown because deep beneath is the unseen grounding of Creation power. Humans know that power which transcends the current evils resisting our growth toward God’s Will.
As particles of a greater body which we cannot comprehend we are each important and to be honored for the life we each radiate in countless expressions.
Humans not only express but respond to and build upon other expressions. To live is to express or radiate being; to project who we are. Whether I sit motionless (theoretically!) or busy myself in one of infinite occupations, I am an entity showing complex reality. Whether anyone notices me in any of these occupations, or not, I am still a manifestation of reality. We all can sense the significance of this if we allow ourselves and one another the time to wonder about it. This is not a leisure time activity for a few privileged vacationers, but a human trait the denial of which causes death.
We notice that “sense of significance” when we pause, quiet ourselves and let it impress us. Sometimes an expression from elsewhere stops us and awakens that sense: beholding a wonder of nature, experiencing another person’s creation, discovering something we didn’t know we could do … think what has impressed you with a sense from beyond yourself, or made a sense of awe happen inside you.
It is hard to put into words (but thank you, words, for trying) because this “sense of significance” surpasses knowledge. I know because way before I got educated I sensed it when I contemplated the stars, smelled the alfalfa fields, encountered another kind of creature, realized what I could do with colors, got a reaction from an audience, …
Once a small group of us kids running around the neighborhood found a dead rabbit and we felt we should try to bring it back to life. Perhaps a lot of education would have helped because our efforts were fruitless. But there it was in my four-year-old heart, that sense of coming face-to-face with a Beyond which we call by so many terms: God, Life, …
It has also been called “Love” which takes the term far beyond what most of us apply to it most of the time. But this term does suggest that we can participate in that Unknown Greater Reality. “Love” can guide our behavior to intentionally explore new life and become more than we have imagined.
We also choose to limit ourselves and others’ exploration into new life usually out of fear and the misconceptions of greed which smother the expressions of love. For millennia we have taken steps of progress and stepped back. We have tried this or that, and asked “Is this the Beyond we’ve been sensing?” But eventually we realize there is more further on.
Some enjoying the benefits of the time and place try to stop progress by force and subterfuge resulting in killing and destruction. But Love itself awaits and beckons us beyond these delays. Every time we have tried to lock down on a certain place we have attained we eventually realize, “No it’s not that; we better keep growing; we haven’t grown up yet.”
About 1,950 years ago St. Paul confessed he had not attained it but pressed on (Letter to the Philippians 3:12-14). He wrote a prayer “to be strengthened with power in the inner person through God’s Spirit, … rooted and grounded in love … that surpasses knowledge, … the fullness of God … able to do above and beyond all that we ask or imagine according to the power that works in us.” (Letter to the Ephesians 3:14-21)
I am still praying that prayer.
