#10 - Love: The Divine Connection Beyond Religious Boundaries
Today is Good Friday one of the biggest days in the calendar of the Church. Which leads me into an area so contentious that it has been the cause of almost every war known to mankind!
So I'm treading with footsteps as light as I can in order to offend no one, judge nothing, but merely offer what I've learned on my travels so far.
In matters of religion, complexity is rife! I'm aware there's a risk of over-simplification that can irritate friends of a more rigorous disposition. But trying to cut a path through the unbelievably complex is a challenge. Especially in less than five hundred words!
Paradox
The challenge of being human
The challenge of being divine
It's not always easy
Where to draw the line.
Several million words can be summed up by a wise Quaker tenet, 'To see that of God in every man.' But if you don't believe in that which is called God perhaps you get stuck? Suppose you try to define it? That depends obviously on your own understanding. Which in itself leads to another enormous mind-bending, dogmatic, judgemental, complexity in which to get bogged down!
'To see that of God in every man.'
So will try, very briefly, to relate how I came to my own definition. I certainly had a religious upbringing but when I was seventeen everything changed. My sister, age twenty-five died a few hours after giving birth to her second child, a daughter. How could God let this happen? Wasn't God supposed to be loving and merciful? I was very angry and wished to have nothing more to do with Him, or It, in any form! But when I reached my thirties, another tragic death threw me into terrible grief and confusion. I had to find a way out.
At a workshop on healing energy, I had a conversation with Lillian Carpenter. She was a Bahái but, interestingly, also wife of the Dean of Westminster. She invited me to tea at the Deanery and suggested I look at a very large paperback called, A Course in Miracles. Et voila! The wisdom it contained has helped and sustained me from that day onwards.
To me nowadays, God, very simply is LOVE. 'God' can have a thousand names, depending upon your culture, your understanding, your choice of routes and roads. Love is innate in us all, no matter what we say or do or how we appear in the physical world. Love is in every single man, woman and child, and every single living thing on this planet.
The Beatles had it right! 'All you need is Love'
A very happy and peaceful Easter to everyone! Next week we'll be looking at the delights of nature!