Unconditional Love

Real Love

“If you've ever really loved anybody, then you know what true love means. It means you love them more than you love yourself. If you truly love someone, your love sees past their humanness. It embraces their whole being, including past wrongs and current shortcomings. It is like the unconditional love of a mother...What if that is how God looks upon [God's] creation.”

Michael J. Singer (The Untethered Soul)

The last chapter in Michael J. Singer's book, The Untethered Soul, is “The Loving Eyes of God.” It chronicles the exact nature of the love of God i. It is beyond all conditions, beyond exclusions, beyond categories of human religions. It does not see the sins, or the crimes, or the difficult behaviors. The love of the Creator for creation is simply overflowing and limitless. That's hard for us to wrap our heads around. At least, it is for me. It means that no matter how badly you behave here on earth, the source of love is unchanged. It can be only love. And, that love is equal for all of creation. The very idea of that equality gives us pause, doesn't it? We would like to be the returning Prodigal Son, and not the jealous brother.

I went to a funeral on Saturday. The homily was based on Psalm 23. The minister extracted each verse and related its words to some event in the New Testament gospels. For each and every verse, “He leads me beside the still water...makes me lie down in green pastures...restores my soul...” he listed the condition that only those who believe in Jesus will be counted among the loved and saved, as though the very source of love could be commandeered by one religion to the exclusion of all others. That notion just makes me sad, because it is using the single Creative Power of the universe to divide, categorize and separate. And, it's done so that some of us can feel special, chosen, and better than others. I don't believe God's love works that way.

Coming together as a species requires that we stop teaching our children this limited view of Love. It requires that we open our hearts in the same way the father of the Prodigal Son welcomed home his wayward boy. Without condition.

                                                           In the Spirit,

                                                               Jane