Love in the Time of COVID-19, part II.

Love in the Time of COVID-19, part II.

Real feeling is not like my ordinary emotion. It's always a deep experience of the sensation of love, love for God, the sacredness of life, and my fellow human being. This experience is too often completely lacking within ordinary Being.

Interestingly, in times of extreme distress real feeling has the opportunity to emerge. When human beings are, as a society, threatened, sometimes the scales fall off people’s eyes and they see how valuable their lives and each other actually are. This is a rare thing; a consequence of disaster, which seems to be the only thing that can shock us out of our complacency and self-love. Disaster is never to be wished for; yet once one has it, an opportunity arrives to re-discover a “new” love—not actually new at all, but rather, a deep and ancient love that has been buried beneath our self interest and our obsessive investment in money and things at the expense of human beings and caring. This love is a real love inspired by higher energies, a transcendental force.

In the midst of the undeniable anxiety that affects even the most grounded of us, the fear that perhaps we will lose everything—which means, primarily, our money and our things—we wake up for a moment and realize that what we really need to preserve, what really matters the most, is our Being and our capacity for real Love.

The shock of disaster shows us that we’ve forgotten our Being: that we’ve forgotten how fragile our lives are and how much we need to truly support one another, instead of squabbling about imaginary things like monkeys in a zoo. If I forget myself, my Being and my capacity for love, in the midst of ordinary life I become possessed by imaginary dangers, and lose my ability to prepare for or meet real danger when it comes.

Now is the time I need to come back to my Being and rediscover my capacity for love. I was given this capacity to love God and to love others as a sacred charge. 

How do I meet this responsibility?

This begins in the smallest actions of my life. I need to pay more attention to what I'm doing and how I treat others. It’s in the smallest things—the least actions—that I can begin to re-discover this practice of Loving Being.

Simply put, the practice of Loving Being is the immediate, intelligent, and attentive recognition in this individual moment of the sacredness of life and the essential value of our humanity. Not to think about it.

To feel it.

We’re called by life itself to love God and love one another; not to love ourselves and things and money. Every time my attention turns away from the present moment and my investment in it, I forget my sacred duty to Be and to Love. The human organism has a powerful capacity for this kind of inner concentration; and it begins incrementally, in my attention to what’s right here, right now.

If I make an effort to understand this, every practice in life can be a heart practice.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.