How Do I Love Thee — the One?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning asked, “How do I love thee?” Have you ever asked yourself: How am I to love the One? How am I to love myself? Have you ever pondered such questions. It’s so easy to get turned around in thoughts, to get tangled in deep contemplations. How much easier it is to simply engage in something literally thoughtless, something rote and numbing so I don’t have to try to make sense of things that are much too big to think. And yet there is a gnawing desire in me that won’t leave me alone – that calls to me from within. I hear and inner voice saying, “I love you for you and I are one.” Sometimes I pretend I don’t know it’s there, I try to ignore it. Then it dawns on me, It is not to be ignored for without It I would not be. It is the one life that Hippocrates called the “soul” when he declared, “The soul is the same in all living creatures although the body of each is different.” There is only the One Life.

On this journey when I turn toward the One, feeling such intensity, I fear I may fly too close … too close to the sun and fall into a blackness and disappear like Icaras, so I try to run from it. Then I realize, I may be able to run away from some things or situations but I cannot run away from that which is in me … that which is me. I must befriend it. I must love It before I can truly love myself and here goes another one of those tangles: I must love It before I can truly love myself, yet where to do I start other than by learning to love me. I can engage in all sorts of mental gymnastics in order to avoid spending time with the One. Yet, because the One is expressing Itself as all that is, I cannot not spend time with the One. Everywhere I turn, every thought I think … there is only the One so whether I’m racing along at 100 miles per hour or sitting in quiet contemplation, the One is there. So where do I start?

Sometimes I wish It would just leave me alone and yet alone-alone is not what I want. What I want is to be so awake to the presence of the One that I remain in awe and appreciation moment by moment in a state of peaceful alertness. I want to live in the power of wow!

You may be saying to yourself, “I’ve had that conversation with myself.” You may be questioning, “How am I to love the One when I am not sure how to love myself?”

Be gentle yet firm with yourself as you investigate the various limited expressions of who you think you are. Remember you are divine consciousness manifest in physical form. It is that physical form, your body, that allows you to engage in this experiment called Life … that allows you to open to loving the One and opens you to fully and completely loving yourself.

Namasté

Rev Trish

This entry was posted in Latest News, Ministers Musings on August 12, 2016 by CSL Metro.