Love Light

Falling in love, being in the presence of divine love, is perhaps what the moon suggests in Hafiz’s poem. Love is like turning into light – the light that pours into us and into others. Love comes from light, yet further light comes from love.

I have been reflecting on the notion of Light; the amazing quality of light that allows illumination for seeing, feeling, and experiencing. What is this magic? For example, when you notice that you have your heart hidden away, what causes it to come out of hiding? What exposes it? Surely the effect of love is melting. The awareness of light allows the warmth and melting of frozen hearts.

There is not a time or season that light does not pour gently upon us. However, we are in an intimate and constant relationship between lightness and dark. Light illuminates dark, yet retains relationship with dark. Natures cycles, from night to day, from womb to birth, sorrow to joy, winter to spring – light is always in relation in a dual nature with dark. In this, the sad/joyful heart, and again, love.

How does Light pass, from one to the other? Well, I think it is the Spark! The spark from a glowing ember ignites something next to it. From one log of glowing embers, we burst into flame when we are two. This is the way. We can draw upon the holy spark that dwells within us. There is potent energy here. It becomes radiant and bright, full of glory when shared this way.

I read…John of the Cross wrote a poem called “The Living Flame of Love.” This is about the total transformation of the soul in the Beloved. In this, he speaks of the sparks that matures into flame. The soul not only unites to the fire that God is but also produces a living flame. Thus, true love is creative and fruitful. Those with this fire within become openly radiant.

“The flame of love is the Holy Spirit…And that flame, every time it flares up, bathes the soul in glory and refreshes it with the quality of divine life. Such is the activity of the Holy Spirit in the soul transformed in love: the interior acts he produces shoot up flames, for they are the acts of inflamed love, in which the will of the soul united with that flame, made one with it, loves most sublimely.”

John believed that because the Holy Spirit is so fully at work,

“all the acts of the soul are divine…Hence it seems to a person that every time this flame shoots up, making him love with delight and divine quality, it is giving him eternal life, since it raises him up to the activity of God in God.”

Love takes on the characteristics of fire:

“Since love is never idle, but in continual motion, it is always emitting flames everywhere like a blazing fire…The soul is affected in the deepest center, for God does his work in the soul’s depths. And the soul’s center is God.”

I feel so much love. This love is kindled like the light of a flame. We glow with a radiance of love – from being this love and sharing this love, rising “…up to the activity of God in God…”