"...the deepest beauty of love is how it changes lives." Robbi David Wolpe
Common contemporary definitions lack depth.
We need greater understanding into this most essential, profound, and powerful thing called love.
A couple months back, I talked about Christ not being Jesus' last name but His title. He is the anointed One who unites humans with God and even all creation through His pattern of order, disorder and reorder. When we recognize and embrace this, we grow in His Spirit and the integrity of the universe.
Today I want to get more into what this means for us practically: Christ redefines love and experiencing Him changes us to grow how we love. Whole hearted belief purifies our definition of love, decreasing our confining definitions and unhealthy practices. To change our practice of love, we need to redefine love. Our understanding of love is a radical source of happiness and healing. This redefinition is an essential part of growing up to fulfill our potential to positively impact our family, work and even the world.
We want love that grows us and those around us. We all recognize positive flow when we experience it just like we know resistance and coldness when we encounter it. When our presence creates safety for mistakes and patience for substantial change, we align with the ever expanding universe. When we give up our small minded uniformity, we let go of desires for separation, superiority and control—all the things that try to stand in the way of healthy progress. Small mindedness is driven by desire for 'what's best' but at its root, it's commonly a fear of uncertainty and lack of deeper self knowledge and management. Thus discernment is needed, much more than enforcement; we need to awaken to humility that truly fosters unity and diversity. Universities were founded with this ideal in mind but floundered when its leaders lost sight of the power and vitality of the soul, succumbing to hidden, dis defaults and gaps in knowledge and understanding of the universe’s integration.
What happens when we don't let go of our smallness and receive life changing love?
Our world is static—confining us to do what ‘everyone’ else is doing, competing for ‘limiting resources’. Our mindset becomes one of scarcity. With this perspective, inclination to protect will override the healthy balance of faithful living. Abraham, the father of the Jewish nation, is also known as the father of faith. Why? God called him to leave his country and father’s household to go towards a place unnamed and unknown. This is faith and it’s contrary to a mindset of scarcity and smallness. It is also contrary to the essence of love. If our faith focuses on exclusivity and protection of what has been, we are opposing God / Love. Recall the religious leaders that persecuted Jesus. They plotted to kill Him because He was threatening the status quo and the "religion" of the Jews. Even the apostle Paul before his conversion, as he strove to cleanse his nation and religion, was confronted by Jesus asking why "...are you persecuting Me?' and "kicking against the goads?" Paul didn't know it but he was getting in God's way to bring greater love into the world, even into Paul's world.
Richard Rohr says religion is not the church we attend. It's not a set of beliefs and rituals. It's the cosmos we belong to. That's exactly what we find in the New Testament—a new cosmology. Paul, the author of 13 epistles, wrote about what God had done in Christ and how it reframes all of reality. And in this, He has redefined love.
'Religio' means to reconnect. Sincere and authentic religion reconnects us with the universe and the God who created it. Through real religion, His nature and ways become ours. We become partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4)
Why don't we see more people participating in the transforming power of divine love?
Due to our family of origin and societal pressures, we are much more compromised than we realize. We may be highly functional at work and even ministry. But what happens at home with those we love reveals the real operating system we are running. Moreover, what happens at senior leadership levels significantly reveals the presence of transformative love or not. We desperately need organizational health at all levels of society: our interior, our homes, our work places.
Jesus declared He is the way, truth and life. He is the revelation and embodiment of God's modus operandi. What would it mean to run this divine OS?
Jesus' icon is the cross. Why identify with something so humiliating and excruciatingly painful? Rohr's great insight: God folds our primary problem into His primary solution to generate greater love. The universal source of our relational problems is the pain of abandonment. It is the root of societal pathologies. An unhealed victim of abandonment perpetuates harm and abuse. The trauma may be forgotten by our conscious mind but it is retained by our subconscious. This latent root of fear and dysfunctional behavior creates havoc in our health and our management, at intra and interpersonal levels. We inaccurately perceive situations as extremely negative and we freeze, fight or flee unnecessarily, often causing more and more damage.
Jesus being nailed to the cross modeled God's refrain from actions in the midst of the agony of abandonment. He cried out, "My God, my God why have you forsaken me?" yet didn't curse, attack or blame anyone for His pain. He didn't withdraw and check out from what was going on but remained open to His close friend John, His mother Mary and even the others crucified with Him. He refused to numb His pain when a soldier offered Him a sponge with medicated wine. And He asked His Father to forgive His perpetrators because they didn't know what they were doing.
Miraculously, His execution became the doorway to resurrection, where renewal and restoration recreated and reframed reality for us. This is the Gospel and its power which gives us courage to follow Love's downward flow, the descent of humility to partake in the divine nature. It is a wilderness experience that God’s Spirit leads us into. This spiritual work redefines how we love by humbling ourselves to take up our cross, this is the practice of divine love.
The Gospel, God's source code, empowers us to create new possibilities for a brighter future for all. This practice is the source of forgiveness, releasing us from toxic grudges, resentments and limiting cosmologies. With God’s power, there is even healing for the devastating tragedies of toxic stress.
Running this new OS, we bear witness to the risen and always loving Christ. Our soul's need for intrinsic freedom is fulfilled. We are going to Galilee to meet Him. (see my previous post)
In contrast, when we simply react to abandonment pain, we do not forgive and we also do not experience forgiveness and thus will not love as God loves. We are not letting go of hurts and limiting beliefs and values. We're stuck in a repetitive past. Being stuck becomes a default and we live in a self created hell, a small pathetic place that fosters isolation and misery leading to regret and bitterness, aka gnashing of teeth.
The death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ is the cosmological source of divine love. This is God's gift to His creation, a very accessible pattern for freedom and largeness of soul. Without this grace, there is no future or creativity. Without its transformation, we end up believing things will never change because 'that's just the way the universe is'. This is a radical lie generated from minds and hearts set on scarcity.
A spacious soul is always ready and eager to love. It is willing to lay aside rules for a life giving relationship (Colossians 2:13-15).
This is the universal definition of love that transcends any human categorization ie. Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Taoist, Agnostic, Atheist, etc. This is a love that invites all to participate regardless of profession or socioeconomic status. It's all about a choice. Hold on to the effects of past dysfunction or say yes to new possibilities of divine, universal love.
More than anything else, this is the love our families need. With this love, we thrive, our marriages last, and our children and future generations are blessed.
This is why I center on growth.