We Need a new Story of Love
At this time of unimaginable horror in Gaza and other places in the world, when life for so many is either ended or destroyed beyond repair, there is not much time for us to change course collectively if we are to salvage ourselves from our spiral into madness.
Given the broken state of our world, it’s all too apparent that we are living out of a story that is too small for who we really are. We are living from a story of limit, lack and not-enough-ness; a story of fear and disrespect for the other. A story in which we are cut off from nature and do not belong to the proper functioning of the whole. A story that is manifestly built on ideologies and philosophies of greed, separation, individualism, and even evil. It’s a story that does no justice at all to the beauty and the divinity of who we really are. It’s a story that denies the need for spiritual, emotional and psychological growth as the path to wholeness in life. Yet we continue to contort and deform ourselves to fit into this crippling narrative of limit, lack and fear.
We have accepted a finite story that speaks to our finitude instead of a transcendent story that speaks to our innate divinity. We need a more expansive, holistic story and worldview that will allow us to flourish in body, soul, spirit and love. That which is greatest about us: our spirit, our soul, our capacity for love, our imagination, creativity, and innate connection to Spirit and the natural world cannot be contained within any finite, human story. By our nature we transcend in every way the stories and ideologies of separation and individualism that we have come to believe contain and limit us.
We allow ourselves to be kept small by a culture and even by religions that are rooted in the material, in reason and dogma. We live primarily out of a material, rational, finite and de-spiritualised world view, but if we are to flourish as we are designed to flourish we need a far greater, transcendent story of who we are and why we are here.
The essence of our true self is not just a material-rational being, but a human-spiritual self that transcends matter and reason in every conceivable way. We are material beings with the capacity to reason but we also are designed to awaken to our spiritual essence as the whole point and purpose of our life. That’s the mystery and that’s the miracle. That our spirit lives in the material form of our body and the whole point is to transcend the material body, to transcend the intellect, and to rise above every perception of limit, lack and finitude during the ordinary course of our human life. We are designed to awaken to our higher self, to transform utterly so that we begin co-create life with Life and take proper care of those around us who suffer.
Yet, we persist in living as if we are resolutely limited and finite and that our most pressing concerns are material ones. We derail our true path through life and deform our life energy by settling for trinkets – maybe gold trinkets studded with diamonds, maybe brilliant intellectual understandings of life, maybe a successful career path – but all in a fatal misunderstanding that deliberately forgets that our body is a tabernacle for our heart, our heart a tabernacle for love, our love a tabernacle for our soul, and our soul a tabernacle for our spirit.
What is unique about humanity is that we are designed to break free from limit and lack — as a butterfly emerging from her chrysalis — as a shooting star, to soar beyond the physical, rise above the material, transcend the intellectual, and reach beyond the finite in order to grow into our transcendent, spiritual self as a natural unfolding of human life. It’s a paradox - that to become fully human we must transcend our humanity and become other than we think we are – we must become human-spirits, we must become divine-human beings.
The path of deification of the human has long been recognised as the true path of life but this knowing has been lost to Western religious and cultural consciousness. We need to recover the sense of the sacredness of life, of our already existing divinity, and to live from that sacred, higher self-knowing and not just from our humanity. We need to change the emphasis of where we place our attention in life from the small, individual, separated self – to our expansive, life-giving divine-self and live towards the universal, divine horizon of existence.
In our acceptance of a story that is too small for who we are and what life is truly about, we have boarded up the portals that provide natural access to this other way of being. We’ve grown scared of our own nature as also-part-of-nature, as also-spiritual, as also-otherworldly, and as also-divine. We no longer know ourselves as beings designed to walk between worlds in reciprocal relationship with nature and Spirit; as humans designed to remember our original belonging in the light. We have forgotten how to remember who we are. We are meant to remember to wake up to our divinity during the ordinary course of life. In this refusal to remember we are truly living in a dark age.
We have cut ourselves off from the river of life, from the channel of Divine Light. We’ve severed the energetic-spiritual umbilical cords that connect us to others, to Mother Earth and to the Divine realm. We live lost and alone in a universe that we have allowed to become incomprehensible beyond the scientific-materialist worldview. And yet we wonder where it all went wrong?
Our humanity is just one part of our true self that continues to exist whether we acknowledge it or not. If we could acknowledge it then we could accept that in our wholeness we are material-rational-earthly-spiritual-divine beings. Each incredible part of us needs to be integrated for a proper understanding of who we are, who others are, and what life is all about. Ignoring certain aspects of who we are leaves us hopelessly lopsided, leading hopelessly lopsided lives.
Carl Jung said, ‘I don’t believe God exists – I know God exists.’ We need to acknowledge the full and far-reaching essence of who we are with that same level of daring and to recognise the divinity of our own selves and begin to live from that deepest and holiest part of who we are. It’s time to throw off the deadening weight of a story that is too small for us. It’s time to break free in every imaginable way from the binds we have fashioned to keep ourselves small, limited and in denial of our True Self.
We need a new story that allows us to experience the vast beauty of who we are when we accept, acknowledge and live from our divinity and not just from our humanity. We need to begin living from our higher self and not just from our small self, from our spirit-self and not just from our material self. We need to recover a proper, respectful relationship with ourselves, others, Nature and Spirit. We need to undo the excessive materialism of our world, the injustice of a system under which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer; we need to overthrow the ideologies of separation, individualism, and de-spiritualization that keep us small and afraid and leads to war, genocide, enforced famine and crimes of every colour. We need to stop living in denial of the life force that gave life to us in the first place; the life force that runs through each of us, through all of nature and the Spirit world. We need to reconnect with the whole of who we are and the whole of who others are, the whole of who Mother Nature is, and the whole of who the Divine Mother-Father is.
The only way we can do this is to accept a new story of who we are, a story in which all is One. And there is only one word needed to name the new story — that word is Love. Love alone can hold everything together in its vast and sacred energy field. Love alone holds difference and diversity together with respect, reverence, equanimity and compassion. The new story needs to be the Story of Love because that already is the true story of who we are and what Life is. It always has been and it always will be, even as we deny it. We must begin again, living not on our own terms but on Life’s terms — according to the one law of Life which is Love. We must begin again to live our lives in love. Love alone is the meaning and purpose of human life and until we orient our lives towards higher love we will continue our descent into the abyss, gilded as it may be, with trinkets along the way.
Image: Book of Divine Works, Part 1, Vision 4: Cosmos, Body, and Soul by Hildegard von Bingen, c. 1165.