‘Receive my love. Become who I am.’
From very early on in my mystical life, Jesus repeatedly said to me, 'Receive my love. Become who I am.' For a long time I did not understand what he meant and recoiled at the surface layer of interpretation of the second limb. I harboured no delusions that I could become who God is. Only gradually did insight begin to dawn that, what Christ is offering is the personal yet archetypal invitation into the depths of our inner transformation. It expresses the essence of the spiritual path which is to be transformed into our True Self, our Divine Self. It's the invitation to become what we believe God to be, which for me, is Love itself.
Even though I already believed what the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church has always believed, that the path of human life is the path of deification, I struggled to accept the living reality of it in myself. It was easy to accept and affirm it in theory, as a philosophical or even a mystical truth — but when the living reality of it began to dawn on me, it stopped in my tracks. The scale of the transformation offered to humans in our spiritual awakening is to become nothing less than one with God, or Love, or Truth. It's to surrender to an inner transformation that reveals the core of our divinity shining though our humanity. It's to become loving in our whole being. But knowing this in theory and accepting it as our living reality are two different things.
The usual inner resistance arose - 'who am I?' etc... but I had to face the inner contradiction. On the one hand I believe we are all on a path of inner transformation to Love, or deification, but on the other hand, I couldn't believe it was actually happening. And even more seriously, I also realised that my inner transformation depended on my response to Christ's words: 'Receive my love. Become who I am.' Despite my avowed and total commitment to the spiritual path in life, despite daily mystical experiences, despite having worked out a comprehensive philosophy of the path of deification, I struggled with the gentle call of Christ, 'Receive my love. Become who I am.' What did it mean in practical human terms?
In time, the beauty of the call won me over. Divine Love was already pouring itself into me as golden light and mystical fire in my daily meditations. I had a burning desire to live for and from love. I had surrendered to a radical new life path as a spiritual author and possible teacher. Wasn't this exactly what I longed for - to become one with Love in every cell of my being? Didn’t I pray every day to live as love on earth?
Then I realised the two-fold answer to the conundrum. I knew that I, as my small finite, ego-self was incapable of receiving The I AM into my being - that I would be annihilated. That it had to be God-in-me that received God-in-me. My prayer changed to one of total surrender to Love, and I said to Christ, 'If I am to receive you, it must be you in me that receives you. I cannot do it.' This settled my heart. There was nothing grandiose about it, rather a staggering, awe-filled humility that the Divine truly seeks a home in each one of us, and is offering nothing less that Its own Self as the living reality of our being. And the bare fact of the matter is, we cannot do or achieve this ourselves in our finite humanity so we must let it be 'done unto us.' It dawned on me that to ‘Receive my love’ constitutes the inner dynamics of spiritual transformation or rebirth in spirit. We must receive what we want to become.
The second barrier that dissolved was the realisation that this is not an exclusive invitation to a few random humans but it is the universal invitation to all of us. Every single one of us is invited into this deifying transformation to love. And not only that, the future of humanity depends on it. It depends on us hearing the call and surrendering to Love-itself so that collectively we can change course and save not only ourselves from our human madness but our beautiful Mother Earth and all of Nature too, whom we desecrate in a million barbaric ways.
In every way this is the transformation from our caterpillar state to our butterfly essence.
Thanks for reading.
Image: Ellestaley on Pinterest.com