Tuesday, February 10, 2009

What moves the sun, the moon and the other stars...

The saints are so aware that love is not something to be worked for - to be worked up to or learned in workshops. It breaks through now and then, in ways suddenly obvious.

Maybe it's looking at a sunset or a beloved one; maybe it's a moment of insight or a gut intuition of the foundational justice and truth of all things. But when we discover love, we want to thank somebody for it. Because we know we didn't create it. We know we didn't practice it; we are just participating in it.

Love is that which underlies and grounds all things. As Dante said, love is the energy "that moves the sun, the moon and the other stars."

Richard Rohr, from Enneagram II: Tool for Conversion, p.189

I think this is beautiful - beautiful in the way that things that are entirely true are always beautiful. There is such refuge and mercy in these words: we do not need to be responsible for somehow generating, or, since that is impossible, for not generating, love. All we have to do is realise that it is; and that it is in the end greater than all the evil and all the despair that the enemy can set up against it. God is love; and God is sovereign... though the peculiar form of his sovereignty - mercy - can only truly be seen at the Cross.

2 comments:

Sue said...

Yes and yes and yes and yes! :)

It often occurs to me how natural love flows when the body is in a relaxed form, not striving or stretching for what is here ... or not here, as the case may be.

It really is so much more like entering into a river than it is creating a river out of your own self :) The second is appealing to the ego even though it's stupidly impossible. The first is so beautiful that the spirit wins out in adoration over the ego's bleatings.

And that's a beautiful thing too! :)

Tausign said...

One word comes to mind...'grace'.