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Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States - Center for Action and Contemplation's Father Richard Rohr's Meditation "Sabbath -- Love; Welling Up" for Saturday, 29 November 2014 - When we accept the unconditional love and undeserved mercy that God offers us—knowing that we are not worthy of it—then we can allow God to love others through us in the same way."Sabbath Meditation"Love
Remember:
The core belief of all the great world religions is that the underlying reality of everything is love. (Sunday)
Love does not need or demand anything back, because you know you are participating in a single, Bigger Gazing and Loving—one that fully satisfies and creates an immense Inner Aliveness. (Monday)
When your only goal is love, especially love of God, you really cannot fail. (Tuesday)
Love is both who you are and who you are still becoming, like a sunflower seed that becomes its own sunflower. (Wednesday)
Love has you. Love is you. You already are what you are seeking. (Thursday)
To be fully conscious would be to love everything on some level and in some way—even our mistakes. (Friday)
Rest: Welling Up
Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself” not “as much as you love yourself.” We are to love our neighbor in the same way we love ourselves. “We love because God has first loved us” (1 John 4:19). When we accept the unconditional love and undeserved mercy that God offers us—knowing that we are not worthy of it—then we can allow God to love others through us in the same way. It’s God in you loving you, warts and all, and God in you loving others as they are. This is why the love you have available to give away is limitless. As Jesus told the Samaritan woman, “The water that I shall give you will turn into a spring inside of you, welling up into limitless life” (John 4:14).
The following exercise is based on a teaching from Friar Francisco de Osuna, O.F.M. (1492-1542), the spiritual “master” of Teresa of Ávila. Here is what he taught his students:
1. Dam up the fountain of your soul, where love is always springing forth.
2. It will be forced to rise.
3. Yet it will remain quiet and at rest within you; wait for that quiet.
4. You will see the image of God reflected in your own clear waters, more resplendent than in any other thing—provided the disturbing turmoil of thoughts dies down.
What follows is only a commentary and aid on that teaching, so that you can experience it for yourself. It is really quite similar to what the Hindus discovered in tantra, where you hold the powerful gift so that it can be deepened and refined before being expressed.
Try to stay beneath your thoughts, neither fighting them nor thinking them. Hold yourself at a deeper level, perhaps in your chest, solar plexus, or breath; stay in your body self somehow, and do not rise to the mind. Resist any desire to repress or express, just allow animal contentment. It will feel like “nothing” or darkness. Stay “crouched” there at the cellular level without shame, long enough for Another Source to begin to flow and well up as light or sight or joy.
This is the “super-essential life.” From this place you become seeing, and the love flows through you from the Source, as an energy more than as an idea. You cannot “think” God. God is never an “object” of consciousness like any other thing, person, or event that you “know.” God is always and forever the subject, the doer, the initiator, “the Prevenient Grace.” You have then “become” what you hope to see. Subject and object are one. God in you and through you sees and loves God—in yourself and in others, too.
Adapted from God as Us: The Sacred Feminine and the Sacred Masculine
(CD, DVD, MP3 download); and Jesus and Buddha: Paths to Awakening (CD, DVD, MP3 download); and The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, pp. 171-173
Gateway to Silence: Love is What Is.
For Further Study:
The Art of Letting Go: Living the Wisdom of Saint Francis (CD)
Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps
Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi
Emotional Sobriety: Rewiring Our Programs for 'Happiness' (DVD, CD, MP3 download)
Gate of the Temple: Spirituality and Sexuality (CD, MP3 download)
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Center for Action and Contemplation
1705 Five Points Rd SW
Albuquerque, NM 87105 United States (physical)
PO Box 12464
Albuquerque, NM 87195-2464 United States (mailing)
(505) 242-9588
cac.org
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