I have never been clearer about my purpose for being in this world. And that purpose coincides with my greatest challenge.
You.
Alright, that is a relative truth. But in practice it points to what is my most difficult aspect of an authentic and an actualized spirituality.
Loving you.
I am here to love you exactly as you are.
Now I know that I can only love you as much as I am able to love myself. I get that. And Divine Love is a continuum and a dynamic that is beyond linear or logical reason. Whether I frame it as loving myself or loving you the foundation is the same. It is a choice to tap, to sync, and to open into Love. It is really not a subject to object relationship. While we may speak of loving God that is again a largely relative concept. You can only love God to the extent that you are loving Love. And you can only love Love to the extent that you are loving yourself and loving the other. So we are right back to the greatest challenge.
Loving you.
So the authenticity of my spirituality isn’t in how good I try to sound or how consistent my church face is or how many gurus’s I can quote. It is in how I am treating you. It is in how I am treating and speaking about those who I disagree with or who disagree with me. It is in the degree to which I follow through on the impulse to gossip, retaliate, and belittle. My spiritual authenticity is in my relationship to what is going on in here, regardless of what is going on around me. My awakening is reflected in how I treat you when you may be coming against me. It is reflected in what I say about you when you are not here to hear it. It is challenged by my belief in my own opinions, my identification with my own projections.
My God is only as good as is my treatment and my caring of you.
And that is a radical practice. Ideologies abound that I find repugnant. Bigotry, prejudice, injustice, greed are flourishing. They are characterized and embodied by those who are sourced from the same Source as am I. My forgetfulness of that truth will result in not only my dehumanization of you but also in my stripping people of their very Divinity. I cannot claim to love God-Love and then denigrate you. That is delusional. And it is dangerous.
And so day by day I face those who do not treat me the way I think I should be treated. I face those whose opinions, ideologies, morals, ethics, and politics I find objectionable. And my practice is to come to in the face of all of that. My practice is to pray into the distinction between the ideology and the person. My practice is to bring an awakened presence to the programming and conditioning so that I can see beyond it.
God-Love is my practice. It always begins with acceptance. It begins with accepting my own rejection-recoil of you based on my paradigm. Accepting that in the moment I do not love you, that I do not even like you. From that place of self-acceptance a different and a higher presence and relationship can flow forth. I am willing to accept you, and even come into love with you. I cannot do that at the personality level. It requires that I access the Source of all Love.
And so this is the dance I am here to do. This is my primary practice. My practice is courageously facing the fact that I am temporarily disconnected from Love, and then praying my way back into it. Your picture is on my altar and you are my messiah.
My primary practice is truly and deeply loving you.
