Increasing the Pure Energy of Love

 The most useful way we can contribute to the divine will for the unfolding of an evolving humanity and universe is to increase the pure energy of love at every moment of our lives. We put love where there was no love before. The next big breakthrough in the story of our evolving world, is the creation of more love, to spread it, to become it. It is the main implication of the Incarnation. And the first responsibility of the Community of Jesus, is to remember, preach and practise that loving vision.

Because love alone provides the current response to the needs of desperate people in a warring world. The churches, the governments, the local communities will all do their necessary best. But that will never be enough. Creation has a heart of love because its Creator has. We must evolve the energy of love, learn it and spread it. It is something we can all do in many different ways – openly within our communities, and hiddenly in our hearts, advancing, enhancing and completing the work of Creation, of Evolution, of the Kingdom of God. But without each one’s life’s effort to become a sacrament, a symbol, a fleshing of incarnate love, the whole beautiful dream of God for us and for the universe will spin out of orbit leaving a terrible and nihilistic dark hole. This way of seeing, of being, of thinking has, I hope, permeated the pages of the book. And with my last breath it will be my deepest desire to diminish and die into that eternal love.

Reflecting on these huge issues occupies my mind with increasing intensity but not with increasing anxiety. In fact it brings me some comfort because it is all positive, hopeful, based on the supremacy of love. These thoughts remind me not to get stuck in my grief, that the work of the tumour is to dislodge all lesser and negative distractions that drag and drain me from the one, last and definitive focus. All of this is an unending struggle with the shadow, the ego, the human stain. ‘. . . but if we lean into the pain, and move to its rhythm,’ James Finley reminds us, ‘love charts its own course and brings us to a profound understanding of this final letting go.’ (Thomas Merton’s Path to the Palace of Nowhere, CD Sounds True 2004, disc 5)

(From section 79 Dancing to my Death)