Divine Love in Uncertain Times: Weekly Summary
Sunday
Faith in God is to have confidence in Love itself. It’s to have confidence in reality itself. God is revealed in all things, even through the tragic and sad, as the revolutionary doctrine of the cross reveals!
—Richard Rohr
Monday
Revolutionary love means loving as God would love: infinitely, graciously, extravagantly. It means loving with God, letting divine love fill me and flow through me, without discrimination or limit, as an expression of the heart of the lover, not the merit of the beloved.
—Brian McLaren
Tuesday
If Christ is at the center of our lives, we don’t have to rush into irrational action that often leads to impractical solutions. “Peace! Be still!” These can be our watchwords as we wait for the guidance and direction of the Holy Spirit.
—Barbara Harris
Wednesday
To pray is to practice that posture of radical trust in God’s grace—and to participate in perhaps the most radical movement of all, which is the movement of God’s Love.
—Richard Rohr
Thursday
The way of love will show us the right thing to do, every single time. It is moral and spiritual grounding—and a place of rest—amid the chaos that is often part of life. It’s how we stay decent in indecent times.
—Michael Curry
Friday
We are living in love if we can maintain a daily yes. That doesn’t mean we don’t recognize injustice and stand against it, but we don’t let our hearts become hardened and our minds become rigid in its judgments. Love is always a yes.
—Richard Rohr
Week Forty-Five Practice
Grounding Ourselves in Divine Love
In the light of eternity, we’re here for a very short time, really. We’re here for one thing, ultimately: to learn how to love, because God is love. Love is our origin, love is our ground, and love is our destiny. —James Finley, Wisdom in Times of Crisis
James Finley guides us through a contemplative practice that anchors us in the transformative love of God:
In this contemplative practice, sit and renew your awareness that you’re sitting in the presence of God all about you and within you. As you inhale, inhale God’s silent “I love you,” in which God is being poured out and utterly given away to you as the miracle of your very life. Then when you exhale, exhale yourself in love: “I love you.” And so, we are breathing along with God, “I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.” From the reciprocity of love, destiny is fulfilled, and the foundations of suffering are healed.
As we sit this way, suffering arises. The suffering then might be our anxiety and concerns today, for ourselves, for our loved ones, for the world. As we sit in the midst of the arising of the anxiety, when we inhale, we inhale this love of God loving us through and through, anxiety and all, finding no hindrance in our anxiety, loving us so unexplainably forever. Then when we exhale, we exhale ourselves in love, anxiety and all, to the love that loves us. This requires gentle perseverance, because anxiety arises again. It doesn’t automatically go away. We sit with it, we lean into it again, and we hold fast to this love that sustains us in the midst of things….
This practice, then, experientially grounds us in this love wisdom. This love wisdom—grounded in practice—empowers us to go out and share this with other people in the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
Reference:
Adapted from James Finley, “Practice That Grounds Us in the Sustaining Love of God,” Wisdom in Times of Crisis, Center for Action and Contemplation, April 26, 2020, video, 6:22.
Image credit and inspiration: Aaron Burden, Untitled (detail), 2016, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. When will this water drop? We don’t know what will happen but Love is with us regardless.
