The Quality of Love

The idea of love as an expression of human beings seems to be inborn.  Humans from the inception of recorded history have attached a great importance upon the idea of love.  Humans see love in everything: poets write about it, Barrette  Browning, "shudders in his lover's shadow," song writers flood the airways with songs of love, while preachers proclaim love as a living force.  Great and infamous deeds have been committed in the name of love, from sacrifice of one's own life to save another's, to murdering the one you love.  Yet for all the attention placed on love and all the vociferous affirmations of love, the world of human affairs has more discord than harmony.  Somehow, love has come to be misinterpreted and misapplied  with regard to human expression, otherwise there would be harmony in the world of human affairs.

St. Paul, in Corinthians, 13, helps explain love in its purest expression.  He writes, "I may gain all knowledge and understand all secrets; I may have all faith to move mountains, but if I have no love, I am nothing."  In this statement, St. Paul dissects love into intention or desire to love.  Where love is, the benefit is "thou."  Where love is not, the benefit is "I."  The man who gains knowledge and understands all secrets, merely benefits himself.  He thus works against his higher nature, and eventually becomes cold, indifferent, and without love.  For such a man, any attempt at expressing love, would be a cheap imitation of love's sentiments, since within each expression is the intention of self-benefit.  Even if the man gave large sums of money and his time to a needy charity, if his intention was to show the world his own beneficence, his actions would be loveless and provide him small merit.  Such a man associates lower selfish passions and desires with higher ideals which is both a delusion and a corruption.  Love, in its purest expression is selfless.

St. Paul continues his explanation of love, "Love is patient and kind, it is not jealous or conceited or proud; love is not ill-mannered or selfish or irritable; love is not happy with evil, but is happy with truth.  Love never gives up, and its faith, hope, and patience never fails.  Love is eternal."

The discord within the world seems to be the result of a rigid focus on the "I."  The self-gratifying wills of collective humanity clash and fiercely fight for fulfillment, but frenzy and discord can be the only out come.  If only we could feel the love of the Universal Spiritual Heart that gives us our beat, and strikes each one with a common rhythm.  As one heart beats, so beats the whole planet, solar system, and galaxy.  We are all commonly tuned and even the slightest of discord reverberates through the entire Cosmos, rewriting our common destiny.

Let us choose to resonate with the Universal Spiritual Heart, and begin to become one with it.  In so doing, we will be able to express love in its purest form.  "Love is eternal."

                                     One truth many paths.  Be good, do good. 

                                                     Louis DiVirgilio