Love

One of the great joys of being a follower of Christ is the increased capacity for love. We start out wanting and needing love and along the way we are hurt when don’t receive the love we desired. Maybe it was a parent who could not offer the love or a first boyfriend or girlfriend who dealt rejection and pain. Whatever the case for most of us life has reduced our capacity for love.

Yet it is this love that makes us most human and connects us most with the Divine. The Trinity is bound by love and God is defined as love. Jesus is love incarnate and he showed a boundless capacity to love through his death on the cross.

Being connected to Christ is the beginning of our ability to love once again. Through Christ we receive limitless love and are brought into the heart of the Trinity and therefore into the heart of love. Paul says in Romans 8 that nothing can separate us from this love. So much of the spiritual path is healing from our past wounds and losing our shame and guilt. This healing opens the heart to love and no longer do we love from our own energy, we love from God’s love poured into us and through us. We become vessels of love, both receiving and giving love.

There is such richness and depth to this way of living. It does not happen overnight but it does happen and Christ works this love in us. So much of our spiritual practice is learning to be loved again and to touch this love in our prayers and see with love as our eyes. To see with love is to see as Christ sees. It is a heart that is reformed and reforming through love that transplants our eyes to eyes of love. These eyes see the unlovely as lovely and then direct the feet and hands to serve the beloved. To see this way is to see Christ in all and through all. Oh how I long for this lifestyle.

Friends let us surrender to ourselves to Christ’s love and seek to love as he loves.