Love in the time of Covid19, part VII

I've been meaning to organize some general thoughts about love, and what it means.

Swedenborg says that in his or her essence, a man or woman consists entirely of what they love, and that this is the durable quality that both guides us through life and exists after death. Meister Eckhart says that the whole of creation rests within God's love, and that that is, in its essence, all there is. He says this in many different ways, but that one sentence more or less sums it up. I doubt Swedenborg would disagree.

Even those who do not believe in God believe in love and love; and even those who love only themselves or destructive actions or things are lovers, because it is in the nature of human beings to love, however it may manifest. He or she who is good loves goodness; the one who is cruel loves cruelty. Thus love acts as a foundation of Being. Let us remember that no man or woman has ever build a machine that loves. Love requires an agency of consciousness; and no matter what else is said, the sciences don't understand the nature of consciousness in the first place.

Love shares some of its etymological roots with other Teutonic words related to the ideas of desire and belief. And of course the function of desire lies close to the root of love in Being. Love is an arduous desire, by some descriptions; a great wish, an urge beyond knowing that swells up in our hearts. It’s always said that love resides in the heart; and yet I think we say that simply to remind ourselves that it does not reside in thought, which may follow it but never leads it anywhere. In fact it resides in more than the heart; it resides in our whole Being, as anyone who is filled with love can tell you – and as the phrase itself indicates.

It's interesting that this phrase exists, and that we generally agree that the mind is thoughtful  but the heart is loving. The idea of the heart as the seat of love does not necessarily mean the physical organ, though symbolism – especially in the Catholic images of Christ with the literal picture of his heart, the actual organ–would have us see it so. When we speak of the heart as the seat of love we speak of it as the essence of a human being, which was the point made in the first paragraph.

The word essence is originally derived from roots that mean to be; the essence is what IS. As God said to Moses from the burning bush, I am that I am.

The words, if we take them thus, indicate Being itself: and that Being begins in and is grounded in Love.

Love and Being are not and cannot be separated.

This brings me back to remarks I made in Metaphysical Humanism about the way that molecules in cells care about the way that other molecules are folded and organized. Love and Care are not any more different from each other that Love and Being; and we see them in action even in the way that molecules behave.

So when I say (as I often do) that our sense of Being must become so intimate that we have a molecular sense of ourselves, I'm not speaking allegorically. I’m referring to an intuitive and organic ability to actively sense this care, even down to the level of the molecules in our cells.

You may think our thought is too large and too coarse to reach to that level and have any sense of it, but I assure you that you’re wrong. Intelligence and sensitivity have depths that go supremely unappreciated in daily life unless one spends years in meditation and daily prayer; but then care blossoms into Being that is unadorned by our complexity, and begins in the care of our cells—an organic experience of the Love that creates us.

This love exists as a rate of vibration within us. It's a harmony established between ourselves and nature that affirms both our connection to it and our own being, as well as our connection to others. It is the natural birthright of all living things; only human beings have lost the ability to sense it, and in this capacity, even a mayfly is greater than us as we are.

There’s something much more fundamental about Love than our egoistic ideas and feeling about it. It’s a great thing connected to the roots of Being itself and to care itself. Even the attraction of subatomic particles to one another is an expression of the care that lies at the foundation of the universe; the forces that govern that are not just mechanical principles, but an essential expression of love and caring.

This expression becomes more concentrated as atoms and molecules organize themselves; and the care that they express at higher levels of the universe would not be there at all if it was not, in its essence, already present at the root. Our physical sciences have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the universe by ignoring this principle of care and agency, both governed by Love. (Of course, our physical sciences can only study the material, and it's not possible to build a machine to take Love's temperature or see how hard or soft it is. So perhaps they should be forgiven.)

The only part of creation that can take such a measurement is our awareness; and that, as well, cannot be explained by measurements taken by any machine.

The subtle force of love, which governs awareness, may be corruptible, but it is never extinguished. We are custodians responsible for the expression of that force; and in every moment, we make choices as to how to exercise duty.

This confers a stewardship with sobering demands; yet that stewardship, for all its gravity and demand, is one with a kernel of joy at its heart.

May you take good care and be well this day,

Lee