Love Can Change the World
And it begins with you.
A young man came to our door one afternoon looking for a
minister to talk to. He was not in crisis in any dramatic sense. He was simply
searching — unsettled by what he saw in the world and unsure where to turn.
He talked about the polarization, the anger, the fear. He
expressed his disillusionment with the church he had grown up in, which had
offered him doctrine but not, it seemed, the living truth he was hungry for. He
was asking the question that so many of us are quietly carrying right now: Is
love actually strong enough to do anything about the state of the world?
I have been sitting with that question ever since.
The Temptation of Despair
I understand the temptation toward despair. I feel it myself
at times.
When I look at the division in our public life — the way
fear has been weaponized, the way human beings have been reduced to categories,
the way so many people seem to speak past one another rather than to one
another — I sometimes wonder if love is not simply too quiet, too slow, too
easily dismissed to matter in the face of all that noise.
And then I remember something.
Fear is loud. Love is deep.
Fear moves fast, burning through everything it touches. Love
moves like water — finding its way into the smallest cracks, wearing down the
hardest stone, sustaining life long after the fire has spent itself.
I do not believe we are called to be naive about the very
real pain and injustice in our world. Quite the opposite. I believe we are
called to look at it clearly, honestly, and without flinching — and then to
respond from the deepest truth we know.
That truth is love.
What We Mean by Love
I want to be careful here, because love is one of the most
misused words in the English language.
I am not talking about sentiment. I am not talking about a
warm feeling we have toward people we find easy to be around. I am not talking
about the love that costs us nothing.
In Unity, we teach that Love is one of the twelve spiritual
powers — a faculty we possess, not merely an emotion we experience. Love, as a
spiritual power, is our capacity to magnetize, harmonize, and unify. It
is the drawing power of the universe. It is the energy that, when consciously
activated, dissolves separation and restores us to our awareness of oneness.
Charles Fillmore, the cofounder of Unity, called Love the
greatest of all the twelve powers because it is the very nature of God. If God
is Love — not merely loving, but Love itself — then to act from love is to act
from the deepest reality there is. It is to align ourselves with the
fundamental force of the universe.
That is not a small thing. That is not a soft thing.
That is, in fact, the most powerful thing.
As the Apostle John wrote: "Perfect love casts out
all fear." Not argues with fear. Not negotiates with fear. Casts it
out — because in the presence of Love fully realized, fear has no ground to
stand on.
Love as Action
But here is where it gets personal. And difficult.
I have shared openly that I sometimes struggle to love
certain people unconditionally. There are people whose behavior activates my
own wounded places and causes me to see them through the lens of their actions
rather than through the eyes of love. People who frighten me. People who have
caused harm. People whose worldview feels not just different from mine, but
dangerous.
I am not proud of that struggle. But I am honest about it,
because I think honesty is the only useful starting place.
Here is what I have come to understand: Love does not mean I
approve of harmful behavior. Love does not mean I remain passive in the face of
injustice. Love does not mean I pretend that what is wrong is actually fine.
Love means I refuse to reduce any human being — including
those I most disagree with — to the worst version of themselves. Love means I
remember that beneath the fear, the anger, the behavior I find most disturbing,
there is a human being who is suffering. Not as an excuse. But as a truth that,
if I hold it, keeps my own heart from hardening into the very thing I am
resisting.
As I once reflected on the words of Jesus — "Greater
love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends"
— I came to understand that the life we are asked to lay down is the life of
the ego-dominated mind. The part of us that insists on being right, on
protecting its image, on keeping careful score of who deserves compassion and
who does not.
That laying-down is not weakness. It is the most courageous
thing a human being can do.
The Ripple We Cannot See
During one of my morning meditations, it came to me that we
vastly underestimate the impact of our inner life on the world around us.
We live as though the world "out there" is the
primary reality, and our inner life is something private and separate — a
personal matter with no public consequence. But everything we understand about
consciousness, from Unity metaphysics to quantum physics to the ancient
contemplative traditions, points in the opposite direction.
The Butterfly Effect tells us that a small change in one
part of a system can produce far-reaching effects throughout the whole. What is
true in weather systems is true in consciousness. A thought entertained in one
mind creates a ripple in the unified field of awareness that touches everything
and everyone.
When you choose love over fear in a moment when fear would
be easier — when you soften your judgment of someone who has wounded you, when
you offer genuine presence to someone who is suffering, when you refuse to add
your voice to the chorus of contempt — you are not doing a small thing. You are
shifting the field. You are changing the world in ways you will never be able
to track or measure, but that are no less real for being invisible.
We are all doing this, all the time. The only
question is which direction we are moving the field.
What Jesus Was Actually Teaching
I have spent a great deal of my life returning to the life
and teachings of Jesus — not because I subscribe to every interpretation that
has been placed on his story, but because when I look at what he actually did,
I see the most radical demonstration of love-as-power that has ever been lived.
He healed the sick, fed the hungry, and restored the
outcasts. He included those that his culture had decided were unincludable. He
looked at the woman caught in adultery and saw, not a sin to condemn, but a
person to set free. He looked at the Roman soldier and the Samaritan and the
tax collector and saw, in each of them, what he saw in himself: the presence of
God.
And then he said, plainly: "Follow me."
Not worship me from a distance. Not admire what I
did and feel grateful that I did it so you don't have to. Follow me. Do
what I am doing. See what I am seeing.
In Unity, we teach that Jesus is our way-shower — not the
exception, but the example. The demonstration of what becomes possible when a
human being fully awakens to the Divine nature within and lives from that
awakening without compromise.
That invitation is still open. It is open right now, in
whatever moment you are reading these words.
It Begins Here
The transformation of the world does not begin in the halls
of power. It does not begin with legislation, though legislation matters. It
does not begin with systems, though systems must change.
It begins in the human heart. In the willingness to do the
inner work of awakening. In the daily, unglamorous, often humbling practice of
choosing love when everything in us wants to choose fear.
It begins when we stop waiting for the world to become more
loving before we commit to being more loving. When we stop making our
compassion conditional on other people's behavior. When we stop asking why
hasn't someone done something? and start asking what is mine to do?
It begins with the young man at the door, who does not need
us to have all the answers — but who desperately needs to encounter a living
demonstration that love is real, that it is possible, and that it is worth
betting a life on.
It begins with me. It begins with you.
One thought. One conversation. One act of genuine presence.
One moment of choosing to see the Christ — the sacred, irreducible worth — in a
person it would be easier to dismiss.
That is not nothing. That is everything.
The world is changed by love one heart at a time. Let it
begin with ours.
What is stirring in you as you read this? I would love to
hear your thoughts in the comments below.
