Love
Is Impartial
“Love
is the only reality, and it is not a mere sentiment. It is the ultimate truth
that lies at the heart of creation.”
Rabindranath
Tagore
For a
long time now, I have believed that the sacred entity which we call God, for lack
of a better name, is all that there is, and that each part of creation from the
furthest stars to the tiniest microbes is part of it. I believe it to be an all-pervasive,
conscious intelligence, a creative energy that holds the cosmos together. We
are part of that and so is everything else in the known universe.
I
believe this creative force to be benevolent and impartial. As such, I do not
believe that one religion is superior to another, nor that one species is
superior to another. Just as 19th century Indian Bengali poet and
philosopher, Rabindranath Tagore said, I believe that this entity is the power
we refer to as love; it is the positive life-force whose nature is to create.
And since we are part of it, we too are creative by nature. We are meant to dwell
in love; to embody the life-force as creative, searching, curious creatures,
whose job it is to further knowledge and to move toward that which the Bible
(the only holy text I know well) refers to as “perfection.” In the Sermon on
the Mount, Jesus tells the crowd that they should “be perfect, as your heavenly
father is perfect.” (Matt. 5:48)
What we tend to skip over
in this passage is what Jesus said just before that. We overlook the
impartiality of his words and what he means by “perfect.”
“Love your enemies and
pray for those who persecute you so that you may be [children] of your Father who
is in heaven; for he makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good and
sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you,
what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you
salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the
gentiles do the same?” (Matt. 5: 44-47)
Perfection equals impartiality—it
means love equally, unconditionally, and without exception. Now, as human beings,
that is, intelligent mammals, with a selfish streak, we have a very hard time doing
that—at least, I do. But that is as close as we can get to a description of
what the benevolent intelligence that created the cosmos is like. It is like
love—it loves impartially, and it loves without exception. Think about that
today as you go about your life.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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