We Are Love Itself
by Rev. Cory Bradford-Watts
Readings
Proverbs 3:1-7
My son, do not forget my teaching,
but keep my commands in your heart,
for they will prolong your life many years
and bring you peace and prosperity.
Let love and faithfulness never leave you;
bind them around your neck,
write them on the tablet of your heart.
Then you will win favor and a good name
in the sight of God and man.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways submit to him,
and he will make your paths straight.
Do not be wise in your own eyes;
fear the Lord and shun evil.
Read the written message below with music videos
We are love itself. This truth is spoken by many sages and mystics alike, and yet I feel that we often miss the practical import of these words. This idea calls on us to let go of our false ideas of self – limiting ourselves to this body and mind. Instead, knowing that we are one with everything, as well as one with the essence and substance of all energy and life itself: the heat of love and its light and form, awareness. And what may seem a heady concept at first, eventually boils down to the importance of meditative consciousness, to being there for each other and ourselves in compassionate care without the falsely learned concepts of separateness and limitations of self. This is why Christ says to love others as ourselves and to find “complete unity” in God(dess). Why Buddhist sages say that we must center on compassionate awareness, seeing beyond the transient nature of duality and form as we let go of our false selves. And why the 18th-century mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg, called on us to centre on Love and Wisdom as the shared core of all being.
Love can sometimes feel hard to define, despite the many poems, songs, movies, novels, and so on written about it. And yet, this allusive term is said to be at the root of all life according to spiritual teachers. Perhaps, part of the reason love sometimes seems hard to put into words is because it transcends words or any spoken concept. Indeed, some sages tell us that the only way to truly know Love, to truly know God, is to meditate upon the light of awareness and life within.
One deep source to help us know love that is often misappropriated today is Jesus’ teachings (misappropriated because often his followers emphasize labels more so than the active and open love he espoused). Christ’s teachings describe love in various ways, often by giving anecdotes about the behaviours that love exhibits. These behaviours include caring for others, seeing them as ourselves, and letting go of our destructive, controlling, and divisive tendencies. Love shares all, actively. Love points to the true nature of others, our unity in divine love and wisdom itself. And Christ, as an embodiment of Love and Truth itself (shining like the sun), says that we should find our true selves and life in him. I believe this call goes beyond a labelling of our faith in Jesus Christ as Lord, and instead centres on the health found in loving, thinking, and behaving with the anti-oppressive care he taught us to do. As he said, “Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord’ and not do what I told you to do?” (Luke 6:46)
Further, the meditative practices uplifted by both Christ and others are no accidental repetition as they emphasize the necessity of meditative thinking in order to transcend our old ways of divvying up and mischaracterizing the world and ourselves. When we are in “ceaseless prayer,” as the Bible encourages, and always looking to accept the will of God(dess) while relinquishing evil deeds with the power of love, we further enter what a Buddhist may call Bodhicitta or our own intrinsic compassionate awareness. Like with Christ, these Buddhists say that this is essential to uncovering our true selves, the truth of our oneness, and finding salvation or nirvana.
We’re told that not only is loving wisdom at the root of our being, but it is also the light-like and heat-like energy that forms all energy, substance, and being. But, interestingly enough, it’s said that Divine Love and Wisdom is the only true reality, and so all the various passing forms of what we call “existence” are at best metaphors, finite expressions, and indications of the indefinable Love at their core. Even Swedenborg, who described the ever-growing and changing afterlife of an interfaith heaven and the stagnation of a self-chosen hell, wrote that these were all appearances. He believed that at the core of all being was Divine Awareness (Love and Wisdom) and that in the eternal eyes of the Lord all beings are fully one with God and Hell is nothing.
Buddhism too encourages people to internalize the truth that all transient forms and concepts are as nothing, and that we are one being in our own compassionate awareness. Since we are each God’s love, it is in our nature to share love with others, to overcome difficulties by growing into greater love, and to more fully find our rootedness in Divine Love.
I believe that praying for the will of God, as Christians do in the Lord’s Prayer, is an expression of a very Buddhist, Hindu, and Sikh emphasis: let go of the will sourced from our deluded sense of self (your mind’s cravings, attachments, fears, and yearnings) and instead, accept the will of providence around you. Find your inner unperturbed Guru to truly impact and change the world, because it is only through deeply finding your natural sourcedness in a loving God that you “enter the stream of providence,” as Swedenborg called it, finding the Lord’s providence to be your own. This takes more than thinking we know the truth of these words and calls for active engagement in meditative living, where we pull our attention from our mind and into being.
Some might think that releasing our cravings and attachments means never feeling joy or outward love again, but this is not so. Our soul is naturally, infinitely loving – inwardly and outwardly. And love itself is the root of all joy, but a joy that surpasses the whims of the world, as it sees through them. Swedenborg believed that the universe was created out of God’s love, so that Love Itself could share the joys and gifts of its infinity with others. What we sometimes forget is to draw the obvious line of conclusion; we are all infinite loving awareness finding and uplifting love in its expressions all around us, as experienced within our perception. To wake up and find a felt sense of “salvation” we must start to let go of who we think we are, which is letting go of the source of our suffering, and accept what we always were.
Peace and love to you,
Cory