Uncommon Love

...enlightenment is the moment we realize that we are made of love. At that moment, all fear of living disappears. For grace comes to the heart when it realizes what it is made of and what it has risen from. In that moment, grace comforts us, that no matter the joy or pain along the way, we are already part of where we are going. -Mark Nepo - The Book of Awakening

Radical love was the cornerstone of the uncommon life of Jesus. While every major religion espouses love as its major tenet, the depth and unflinching nature of the love that Jesus taught, embodied and revealed is in a rareified league of its own. Most of us cannot conceive, let alone achieve, a love so pure and uncompromising. It is easy to see why so many readily believe that Jesus was God who became a man, rather than the reverse transformation. Yet Jesus was clear in his invitation to all who followed him that his attainment was within reach of all of us. He pointed to an inner dimension of being as the ground of our true nature, the source of godlike qualities and potentialities inherent in each and every one of us.

Our difficulty in loving the way Jesus loved is not a deficiency in our hardware, but much like my computer experiences, stems from operator error. When it comes to our relationships, we mostly deal with each other externally. We react, judge, assume, compare, criticize, resent, expect, infer, using the surface mind, the ego, which sees itself as separate from everyone, and everything, and most of all, separate from the One that unites us. The sense of separation we feel from God and one another is the common bane of our human experience; the root cause of our struggle to love unconditionally.

The uncommon love that Jesus demonstrated was rooted in an unqualified awareness of his unity with God, and an equal awareness of the shared divinity of every person. For Jesus, the scales of judgment were completed removed from his eyes, so that he perceived the pure loving wholeness and innocence in everyone around him, friend or foe. He knew at depth, what we aspire to know, that we all are cut from the same spiritual cloth, that beyond all appearances to the contrary we are the holy offspring of the one life, love, and power we call God. It is only in such extraordinary consciousness that we can truly follow the radical teachings that implore us to "love thy neighbor as thyself," "pray for those who persecute you", and "love your enemy."

When I cling to the truth that I cannot be separate from the love of God, I am more likely to risk loving more radically, more wastefully, knowing, like the wave that rises above the surface that it cannot be separate from the sea that formed it. Our work in relationships with other people is the most potent spiritual practice we undertake, because it brings us face to face with the greatest illusion of our human experience; that anyone or anything could separate us from God. Knowing this requires us to go deeper to access that dimension of ourselves that is guided by the indwelling spirit of love, and from that awareness, we can rise above appearances and see our brother or sister as they really are. Then, like the wave, we can settle peacefully back into the sea of love, the illusion of separation vanquished by our willingness to trust loves promise. A Course in Miracles says this so beautifully:

You are one Self with me.
United with our Creator in the Self
I honor you because of what I am
And what He is, Who loves us both as one.

In this season, that celebrates peace on earth and good will among (wo)men, let it be more than a song on our lips, let it be a reality that lives in our heart.