Practice Love

God’ s kingdom is love. What does it mean to love? It means to be sensitive to life, to things, to persons, to feel for everything and everyone to the exclusion of nothing and no one. For exclusion can only be achieved through a hardening of oneself, through closing one’s doors. And the moment there is a hardening, sensitivity dies. It won’t be hard for you to find examples of this kind of sensitivity in your life.

Have you ever stopped to remove a stone or a nail from the road lest someone come to harm? It does not matter that you will never know the person who will benefit from this gesture and you will receive no reward or recognition. You just do it from a feeling of benevolence and kindness. Or have you felt pained at the wanton destruction in another part of the world, of a forest that you will never see and never benefit from? Have you gone to some trouble to help a stranger find his way though you do not know and will never meet this person again, purely from a good heartedness that you feel within you? In these and so many other moments, love came to the surface in your life signaling that it was there within you waiting to be released.

How can you come to possess this kind of love? You cannot because love is already there within you but you can block its presence. As soon as a conclusion you have made about someone hardens into a belief about who they are, your attitude toward them becomes fixed and you are no longer capable of love’s sensitivity. You are prejudiced and will see from the eye of that prejudice. In other words, you will cease to see this person again. If previously they behaved badly but then changed, you will not see them as they are now; you will only see the past. So how can you be sensitive to someone you do not even see? The moment you say so-and-so is cruel or defensive or even wise and loving, or whatever, you have hardened your perception and become prejudiced and ceased to perceive this person moment by moment, somewhat like a pilot who operates today with last week’s weather report.

The mere realization that these are beliefs, conclusions, prejudices, not reflections of reality, will cause them to drop.