Living With Trauma 21

Love, I mean divine love or holy love always carries with it a price, a very high price. I find it interesting that of all the founders of the world's great religions that Jesus alone actually died for what he offered the world, and the religion based on his life and teachings, unique among all world religions, is based not on his success, but on his failure and death: the very failure that came out of his love and the same failure that became for his followers, and those who love him, the most sublime success. We have also the profound belief in the Resurrection, understanding that love, divine love, incarnated in human form, could not remain dead, being the very essence of life itself and for this reason Jesus rose triumphantly from the dead. I am not writing these words, by the way, in order to diss other faiths. I respect and honour all religions, but I do not play at comparative religion. I follow Jesus Christ and so I will write about Christ and the Christian faith. Since I do not have the wisdom or insight to judge or evaluate other faiths, I am not going to attempt to do so, but will leave that task to the ecclesiastical bigheads. Love, universal love, divine love, this is an ongoing theme that all the religions seem to share in common. In the Christian faith, divine love seems to play a particularly pivotal and foundational role. Here we have the idea of God being so moved by love and compassion for the race of dunderheads he created, that he became one of those doofuses himself, to live, walk and suffer with us with the exception of not falling into sin. He incarnated the love divine and expressed this throughout his life and mission, not merely teaching about love but living it, even to his cruel and ignominious torture and death on the cross. We Christians, believe Jesus to be God, God visiting us in our broken and raw humanity, and God dwelling with us and suffering with us and giving his all, his very best to us as Jesus. Other religions do not believe this, nor should they be expected to. I choose to believe this, as a Christian, yes, but also, as Simone Weil once wrote, this is so beautiful that it must certainly be the truth. There is a high cost to this love. And never before in the history of our world and our broken and suffering humanity has there been a greater need for this kind of love. When we give our consent to divine love we are also consenting to suffering and ill-treatment by a world that rejects love, and sometimes even death. To accept and wholly subsume ourselves into the love of God is in itself a kind of death, because we are dying to our own ambitions, ideals, and desires for the love of the very highest, the Very Highest Love, to live and love in us and through us and to help bring change and healing to our traumatized world and humanity. This is a love that neither seeks, nor needs, recompense. We don't love this way in order to be loved back. It becomes its own reward. I have seen and experienced over and over again in my life this love and I believe that if we are to see lasting change then more of us must also give our consent. People need this kind of love even though they constantly reject it, because they fear the fire and the consummation of self that occurs because of this love. So many of us live without the love of God in our lives, and the Christian religion in its many forms has done such a horrendously lousy job at communicating this love, that is it any wonder that so many people are alienated from God and trapped as prisoners in their shallow, consumerist existence? And of course, they are going to lash out at us, because this love also threatens our sense of autonomy, and everyone likes to be their own little god. And this just creates more problems, except for one little truth: Love is even stronger than the resistance of those who refuse love and eventually love, the love divine will conquer. For those of us who are vectors and channels of this love it is going to be costly and at times painful and lonely, but someone has got to do it. Start the work in me.