Beloved, let us love one another; because love is of God, and every one that loves has been begotten of God, and knows God. Anyone who loves not has not known God; for God is love. -- 1 John 4:7-8 (Darby)Love gets a lot of attention in almost all Christian circles. This verse and the "love chapter" in 1 Corinthians 13 are perhaps the two key informing verses to all this attention. Recently, I picked up a book on Buddhist meditation and one of the meditation forms I came across was Tonglen. Tonglen is a meditation of taking and giving. Through Tonglen meditation suffering is taken in and love is given back.
The very first place love is needed in the world is inside ourselves. The cartoons that have a little devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other are humorous to us because we all have this sense that there is a good person and a bad person inside ourselves. The Apostle Paul said, the good that I would do I do not and that which i would not that I do. We wrestle daily with our internal contradictions of what we preach and what we practice. Rather than just hating the bad parts and our failings, we can use a Tonglen meditation form to transform it. Using the Tonglen meditation form we can acknowledge the misery or suffering we experience within our negative self. Confess our negativity and how it blocks God's love flowing through us. We can then take this Bible verse, recognizing that our negative self IS the other (which we would like to deny exists) and embrace that part of ourselves with love. Let us love even the sinful and difficult side of ourselves first. If we cannot love ourselves there is no love that can be transmuted anywhere else. Know that because God first loved us we also can love ourselves.
Once the love has enveloped our good and bad sides we can then turn to praying our love/God's love to surround whatever other people and places we know exist. Breathing in the awareness of the pain/difficulty and breathing outwardly the assurance of Christ's infinite love for all. God is love. Love is the leavening that expands and grows pushing away all instances of misery, suffering, difficulty, and sorrow. I encourage you to take this "foreign" insight and shape it to fit your own Christian understandings to pray in a different way. I pray as you do so that your own spiritual life and your effectiveness in growing God's love in the world will expand.
Prayer:
Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on us and bless our meditations, prayers, words, and thoughts that the world might know you more deeply and dearly. Amen.
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