"Let's be a miracle..."

"Let's feel what we cannot feel,
know what we cannot know,
Let's heal where we could not heal.
Oh it's a miracle,
Love is a miracle,
let's be a miracle..."

"That's not possible." she said. "It's just too much to expect." Thus far, and no father...

I thought of "her" as I listened to Sara Groves', Miracle tonight. The "her" was me. But the version of me, the one who thought that something could be "beyond loving," now seemed somehow foreign, distant, a specter of sorts.

It wasn't always that way. Over the years, there were many things that, I thought, were beyond my capacity for loving...and, actually, they were.

They were beyond my capacity for loving, but not God's. And when I finally began to understand that, in reality, I had no capacity for love of my own, I was able to see that the infinite well of Love...from which I was drawing upon for the little, easy kinds of loving...was actually fathomless. infinite, and "not of mine own self" -- at all. It never was, and it never would be.

And once I realized this, it seemed silly not to draw on it all the time. To draw upon it more deeply, boldly, and courageously than ever before. To draw upon it for the purest, clearest, holiest living waters of Love's bounty.

This afternoon, I had an experience that was a tiny example of how this shift in my heart has changed the way I see my relationship to the miracle of loving. It seems like such a small thing on the surface, but I felt it to the marrow of my being.

I'd received an email that I found very hard to digest. Everything about it poked at what I love, and what I believe to be true. Of course, the ego (or mortal mind...whatever languaging works best for you) immediately took my feelings of "how could he/she" as an invitation to say, "well, that person/position is certainly wrong, unkind, unlovable." But "it" (the ego) had forgotten that I am no longer the person who once had limits to her loving. I am on my toes these days. I know its nasty tone...it is the voice of judgment...especially assertive when it feels indignant, self-righteous, justified in judging another, because of some perceived slight.

I was actually pretty quick (this time) in realizing that I could not afford the luxury of judging anyone, including the writer of the email, as someone who had perpetrated a slight on me, or my beliefs. It was clear to me that if I allowed myself to judge them, it would make me a perpetrator...someone who judges others. And a cycle of the victim becoming the perpetrator ensues. And that's a ball that will just continue to bounce back and forth, picking up speed, until someone really gets hurt in the crossfire.

So, I stopped. Yep, I just stopped. I sat back in my chair, and asked myself, "Kate, what is keeping you from loving this person...right now?" It was immediately clear, "Nothing!" Not one single thing. My identity wasn't defined by anything anyone else said, or did, but by the way, the "how", I love. And I wasn't going to willingly, or consciously, violate my identity by giving up my right to love unconditionally, impartially, and universally...ever.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

““If I love you,
what business is it of yours?”

Which, for me, aligns with Paul's statement from Romans:

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution,
or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors
through him that loved us.

For I am persuaded,
that neither death, nor life,
nor angels, nor principalities,
nor powers, nor things present,
nor things to come,

Nor height, nor depth,
nor any other creature,
shall be able to separate us
from the love of God...”

Nothing...no person, place, or thing can separate me from my right to love...anything and everything, at all times, in all places, under all circumstances.

Loving...being the very love of Love...is my business. It is my life. It is my "one true thing." It is all that I am sure of. It is what I rest my hope, my confidence, my sense of identity upon. No matter what storms may seem to be roaring "without me," I cannot be made to feel separate from the love of God. I can always find my peace by returning to the center of my knowing, the Scriptural promise that nothing can separate me from love of God.

I don't need anyone's permission to love...it my right to love whatever is in my path. To love every moment. To love him, and her, and those, and that. It is a divine imperative that is asserting itself in each of us. The human will does not have the capacity for that kind of loving. It is not a decision, it is not the result of human endeavor, or the product of noble effort...it simply a miracle of grace.
A miracle of grace -- of Love's influence on our hearts, and it's reflection in our lives. And since, as Mary Baker Eddy says in her poem, "Love":

"Love alone is Life."

We are fully alive, every moment that we are undeterred, and borderless, in our loving. Every small act of kindness, every time we put down our weapons of self-preservation, and love beyond what feels "safe," we are that miracle of grace. It makes me happy to discover how many "miracles" I can find within myself on any given day. Because, there's just always an opportunity to love more right beyond the borders of what we think is impossible....

with Love,


Kate