Love Made Audible

"You don't have to go looking for love when it's where you come from." 

-   Werner Erhard

You have heard this wisdom before.  If you believe that you are a chip off the old block, a microcosm of the macrocosm, an emanation of the One Presence and Power we call God, then you may have a concept that your true nature, like God's, is love itself.  There is of course a vast experiential chasm between a concept and an inner knowing; as between seeing your birth certificate and being hugged by your mother.

If love is at hand, closer than our very breath, and unlimited as Infinite Presence, then why do we not know and feel its embrace and hear its soothing voice?  Just as infants do not recognize their parents until their perceptual abilities develop, we as children of God do not recognize the still small voice of Love despite its constant whispers in our hearts.  We have a form of psycho spiritual hearing loss where our faculty to hear the Voice of Love is dependent on our need for certain circumstances that make Love's voice audible.

If our partner does not return our loving advance, if children disobey or don't call, if our employer overlooks our accomplishments we may experience a world with little or no love in it. If we experience difficulty or loss, we can subconsciously believe that we are unworthy, unloved, even unlovable.  In such moments the voice of fear drowns out Love's eternal message.

This is the real life-threatening disease facing us. We confuse form with content, and create false idols that, true to form, always shatter our faith.

Love is formless, an eternal energy that cannot be limited or destroyed.  Like its divine siblings of Truth, Wholeness, Harmony, Peace, and Joy, Love arises in abundance to meet all our needs when the conditions are right.  Paradoxically right conditions for love to arise are no conditions at all.  While we may seem justified in prescribing what love needs to look like for us to hear it voice, Truth beckons a different perspective.  Truth asks us to give up form for content; give up the fickle for the eternal and be willing to exchange the illusion of love for the real thing. As ACIM says, When you want only love you will see nothing else....you will hear nothing else.

I am a student of unconditional love.  Every day I am asked to hear differently in order to be spared the deafness experience that prevents me from hearing that all that is being voiced in this world is the voice of love or a call for love.

So in the final analysis it seems that love, stripped of externals, comes not by listening for it, but by listening from it. Since it is what we come from, it's what we need to come from.  If we welcome love, it will be at our doorstep, whispering its reminder that it lives with us, in us and as us. This can save us an enormous amount of suffering as we seek but not find in the world for the love that waits only on our welcome, not on time.