Notice the Heart of the Present Moment is Peace-Filled Love
by Rev. Cory Coberforward
Mark 12:28-31
And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?” Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
John 14:15-21 (responsive reading for live service)
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper,
to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth,
whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him.
You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.
I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.
Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me.
Because I live, you also will live.
In that day you will know that I am in my Father,
and you in me, and I in you.
Whoever has my commandments and keeps them,
they it is who loves me.
And they who love me will be loved by my Father,
and I will love them and manifest myself to them.”
Read the written message below with music videos
We each have different ideas about love. I think about loved ones, like my wife, when I think about love. I think about friends and my family. In these thoughts there’s a sense of unity with these other beings which I think is indistinguishable from love itself. This is perhaps why we can treat those we love not always so lovingly, because we treat ourselves not quite so lovingly. Why is that? Some sages tell us that the same reason we don’t treat every living being as a loved one is the same reason we often beat ourselves up, marinating in fear and suffering of some kind or another: we believe and fear that we are separate, isolated beings, defined by our passing minds and bodies, at risk of losing our very light of love when we die. The life of Christ (as with others) serves to remind us that we are not separate from God or each other, that we are one in the body of Divinity and only experience the sense of separation to the extent we believe in it, forgetting the heart of love that we all share and are.
What does it mean that we are all one in love and in God? Like with the Buddha, Christ’s teachings emphasized that we find our unity in God by letting go of our distorted attachment to things by tuning into the Divine Presence that is always with us in the present moment. This Presence isn’t something we have to reach for, since the source of life and life itself are indistinguishable and are the stable light of life that never changes. Notice for yourself that it is always the present moment and that your fundamental sense of being, the openness of awareness, is always with you. This core aspect of every moment is also the light of love itself, and when we start to centre in it we can start to feel this sense of shared love.
In a way, we can call our initial noticings of the shared light of love within “Christ’s Advent” into our lives. It starts off seemingly small and yet already wondrous and transcendent, and we’re led to it by a little light of wisdom in our lives. To find it, we have to drop our imaginary sense of separate self for a moment, as well as our tendency to worry about the future. Indeed, Christ pointed us to this present moment peace in many ways, including by telling us not to keep jumping into the future from a sense of fear. In fact, we can never experience the future or the past, as the present moment is all there ever is. And when we get to know the present moment without jumping forward or backwards, we start to get to know the light of love and peace that pervades our entire eternal life, which is itself synonymous with the present moment! Whether we believe in eternal life or not, just getting to know the light of life of every moment will help us drop our sense of knowing about death, which is enough to dissipate our fearful attitudes.
During the Advent season in the Christian church, we celebrate the Lord coming down and showing us what it means to love. And yet, in our tendency to divide, we miss Christ’s core messages and make it more about him as a separate being, missing his point entirely! Christ wasn’t mincing words when he beseeched us to follow his teachings, called on us to find the unity within, and required us to become like little children and perfect as our Father God is perfect. Through these teachings, he was pointing us back toward the perfection of our very heart, the heart of every moment and the light of life. His example exemplified what life can be like without our false sense of isolation and division. But we don’t have to take his or the Bible’s (or any other sages’) word for it. We can look for ourselves.
In your own experience, can you say that you know for a fact that awareness will die when your body dies? Can anyone else say this? Notice any feelings in the body that arises when you think “I.” Do these feelings actually prove to you that you are your body or that awareness is limited by your body or the thoughts of your mind? And although your experience changes, does the light of awareness change or is it like a clear mirror in which all of your experiences, pleasant and unpleasant, appear? Reflect - what is the aspect of life that makes you so convinced that you are the same being as you were when you were a child - what is the consistent factor in your experience since that time? Is it not the light of life itself?
These types of investigations can help us see that we are all the light of life, one with the root of all beings which some call God. When we start to see this shared light of love within ourselves, then we know other living beings to be this same light more and more (even when their minds or hearts are convinced that they are limited, isolated people). Since this kind of awakening love isn’t marred by a sense of separate self, it holds none of the drawbacks of our more selfish kinds of love. What we are uncovering is the Alpha and Omega itself, an ancient love that is ever new, ever fresh, infinitely creative and all-powerful in its kindness, peace, and natural wisdom. It’s never far and nearer than near.
This is why Christ said he will be with us always. He knew himself to be this light, and as he said, he knew us to be this light as well. Just as it said that he was the son of God, he called us the children of God. Within his very teachings in the Bible, he was dismantling the very sense of separation centuries of Christianity would build around his legacy. But, on a personal level, that means taking his teachings seriously instead of allowing our society-imposed idea of ourselves and our false social identity to continue to colonize our thinking. Indigenous shamans, Buddhist and Hindu sages, and the wisdom of our hearts also teach us this – if we have ears to hear.
This Christmas and Advent season, may we start to truly centre in the heart of the present moment, the only moment there ever is, so that we may truly share in the love that we have for each other. May we let go of our need to reach out to find love, instead, uncovering the love that is always with us and that is us. Dropping our fear for the future and all of its ruminations, as Christ beseeched us to. Releasing our false idea of a limited self by seeing how little this is supported in our fundamental experience as awareness. And allowing the warmth and wisdom of the risen and rising Lord to shine in our every moment as the peace-filled love that it naturally is.
Happy Advent,
Cory