Click for audio: A Labor of Love
“We want a revelation of God as love within us, so that our whole being will be filled and thrilled with love—a love that will not have to be pumped up by a determined effort because we know that it is right to love and wrong not to love, but a love that will flow with the spontaneity and fullness of an artesian well, because it is so full at the bottom that it must flow out.” –Emilie Cady
One benchmark of spiritual understanding that most of us adopt is that of loving our neighbor as our self. Many consider their inability to unconditionally throw their arms around those whose behavior they consider manipulative or destructive as a sign of spiritual immaturity. If Jesus could love and forgive those who nailed him to a cross, can we not do the much simpler thing of loving and forgiving those who would use us to fulfill their short-sighted needs or advance their own selfish agendas?
In such cases, we are usually laboring under a false conception of love, trying, as Cady suggests, to pump up our love through determined effort because we know we’re supposed to be loving. But if we hold to the truth that love attracts to us that which is for our highest good and dissolves that which is not, are we really required to be the long-suffering enabler some might consider the best spiritual example?
What if Jesus had said no to his accusers and lived to be 80 or 90 years old? Might he not have left us, through writing and further teachings, a more complete understanding of who and what he was? Did he do the world the greatest service by submitting to the small-minded actions of his spiritually inept critics? Might he not have been of more value to the world alive than dead? An entire religion grew from the attempt to find meaning in his death. I can’t help but wonder how different the world might have been if this religion had been drawn from his full life instead.
Love, rising naturally within us, not only shows us pure avenues of expression, it also exposes those blockages that keep its light from shining in our experience. We do our world the greatest service, not by trying to love, but by letting our love shine.