love in the particulars

I used the book A Seven Day Journey with Thomas Merton as a guide for my time of silent retreat recently. In it Merton reminds me what I have been slow to live into faith. Namely, that love for God must lead into love for others, and this love must reveal itself in my actions. As surely as night follows day, so too must my love for God grow into love for others. They are inseparable. And, in reality, I reveal my love for God in the way in which I love others. 

Yet I find this all too easy to say. Love for others is easy in the abstract. All to easy in the general. It is when it is love in the particulars that it becomes harder for me. Perhaps this is typical of humanity, this difficulty to love unconditionally in all individuals. But that doesn’t make my sorrow over it any less keen. My heart aches with awareness of the times I turn aside, the times I pass by. I am all too aware of the times I treat someone with less than the respect they are due as children of God, the times I think of them in disrespectful ways, think them lesser or strange simply because they are different from me or from what I expect.

And I realize that is the point, our differentness. In the ways of the world, we are different, unique. But in the ways of Spirit, of Soul we are One - of incalculable worth created in the image of God, joined in love, grace, mercy, compassion. And our differentness serves our oneness in revealing the fullness of God and in bringing healing to all of created life. Yet how easy, all too easy, it is to slip into seeing with the eyes of the world rather than with the eyes faith has given me. 

I have learned, for me, the need is to find ways to pause and touch that still center within me when interacting with someone, with anyone, with anything. For when I connect with that place and then move, then respond from there I move from a place of deeper connection to our oneness, a place more deeply grounded in grace. 

When I stand in that pause, I remember that you, too, are created in God’s image and treating you with that respect becomes easier, and I am able to look for glimpses of God's image as it might be revealed in you.