STUDY GUIDE: FOR LEARNING, LEANING AND LIVING
In any chapter, you may select what most spiritually inspires you, meditate upon it, and work with it until it bears fruitage. This example applies to the chapter “Love.”
Closely related chapters: All My Relations; The Breath of Compassion; Forgive and Be Reconciled; Merely God
Greater light may come to us when we narrow down our focus to one or two principles,
and stay with them until they bear fruitage:
Basic Principles and Key Points Found in this Chapter
The only love we have to give is the love with which God loves us. In Loving God with all our heart and all our soul and all our might, we’re learning to love ourselves as God loves us, and so to love our neighbor as ourselves.
Loving meditation: From impersonalizing, to compassion, to joyous love, as we obtain our priceless divine Contact.
God is love. Spiritual Love is the Substance of every form, it’s the value in physical awareness. All principles of Truth grow from an ever opening Love, it’s the basis of mental awareness too. Our Substance and Consciousness aren’t two, they form one exquisite and terrific unity, which is called our heart.
In reconciliation unto love, each of us meets the Other, the renewed oneness for which this world reaches.
The Loving Principle: Meditatively contacting the Beloved within, and the Sacred Relationships Within Oneness that follow, and the End-purpose for which the universe works, are all really the same thing.
Endlessly branching dimensions reveal themselves when we delve again into every principle which we have studied, meditated upon, and lived out from, and see how it springs from the living God of Love.
By grace, we take upon us now this precious yoke of dedication, devoting our time, our intention, prayerfully seeking the blessing in each situation; we awaken to the Beloved calling within. It’s so important that we have a continuing inner unfoldment on the meaning of this Love, for the gates of the Kingdom swing wide as we experience divine Love. We attain the awareness that “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased,” even in our deepest sense of sin and ugliness or any sense of separation. God, the I That I Am, loves us so intensely, everywhere holding us close and safe and secure, so we too can start to love ourselves (often the toughest part), and start learning to realize that all our relationships are those of God to Itself.
Divine Love defines all God’s qualities, for God is an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent Love. This is the essence of all teaching.
For contemplative enquiry: What do I mean by the God of Love? How does It function? How does It define who I am, who the Other is? How do I see through to It when the picture looks bleak? How do I live Love? When it seems to run dry in me, how do I let it pour out and bless all the world?
Consistency and routine are grand, yet any will power is really given to us, or we wouldn’t need God; with heartfelt surrender, humility and dependence we ask, How am I to live day by day, moment by moment, according to the law of Love? Show me how to forgive myself for all my faults and failings. Let me know the love with which I am to love.
We explore these questions with a readiness to act upon the answers we receive, to live and move and have our being in realization. This helps us to come very quickly to the end of our human ability to do things, which is such a good place to be, for now we can move forward, with our reliance solely on God within, Who doeth the works. God is loving all creation, his rain falls on the just and unjust parts of me, so we don’t make anything happen that isn’t already happening. Let me do or not do now, by releasing myself to Love. As we rest in that Word, we actually see God in action as the fruitage of the work It has given us to do.
We are the unfolding and enfolding Self-completeness and fulfillment of the living God of Love. When we let Love in, let it flow through easily, it sees through every picture of good or bad unfooled, with nothing to oppose, for besides this ever greater Love there is no other. Its compassionate presence reveals our infinite Being, our freedom, renewing, restoring and resurrecting. The glass doors swing out, we’re enlarged into messengers of Love. Let us open our heart and soul to see that holy Love is our mission and our only religion, and Love is the bridge leading us to the Reality of our life.