Friday, October 9, 2015
Lesson 282: “What is the Holy Spirit?” “I will not be afraid of love today.”
Jesus so brilliantly points out in the Course that we are in fact afraid of love. This seems preposterous! How could anyone have anything but the fondest and happiest and the most inviting of experiences around giving and receiving Love? Our egos definitely have one foot of ours in the world. The world’s experience is that Love is not pure and unadulterated. We usually imagine Love tied to so many rules and expectations. Love is tinged with lust that is not inspired. The world says that Love is tainted on every level because it has become so skewed in the world’s perception- which the ego engenders too. This is incredibly unfortunate.
How can anyone live at all? When we are thinking Love always comes with an ulterior motive, how can we live life at all- in the background questioning everyone’s motive who gives or receives this Love? This is the way for us to have a wrong perspective about it. It’s no wonder all or at least part of us is resistant entirely to the purpose of Love. We have no example and experience of Love being purely happy and without false motives. Therefore, we definitely have some part of us that doesn’t want to get into relationships with others. Or, we may have parts of our relationship with ourselves that we just can’t gently tune into because we feel in fact afraid of what we might experience when we are asked to live in Love.
This is incredibly unfortunate for most of us as we get stuck not being able to make peace with what loving entails- lots of us shy away from loving at all because we don’t like or agree with lots of what we assume Loving entails. This is a great tragedy for us and all humans. We end up being utterly confused about Who God is and what God is actually like if Love is the Essence and therefore explanation of God. Then we resist incredibly joining God and living in the Love of God. When love seems so loaded in the world’s view, we often just have such difficulty changing our own inner definition of God.
Our inner fear is definitely the hardest things about living. When we are invited to Love something and then we end up not being able to do that in full because we are too reactive to doing it. It is terrible when we end up getting stuck in our fear. This is one of the things we can bring to God’s altar. Jesus says that God has an altar where we can bring anything we need help healing and thus releasing. What we can do is bring this fear to God’s altar. God has given us the perfect helpful hand in doing this. God says He will take care of whatever we leave on the altar, guaranteed. All we have to do is be willing to notice it, in the event we might be blocking the knowledge of it from our inner selves. What we are asked to do is look inside and get honest about it. We are the only ones who judge what we put on God’s altar. God does not. We just need to do our part which is have the willingness to look deeply within for any bit of lingering fear we may yet harbor. Give it to God- the great Love in everyone’s life.