Day 26

43:21-45:21

I've been thinking a lot about why people love one another. Not family, or sexual love but the kind meant in Love Your Neighbor. Why do we love some people and not others?

In the last year, I've changed my view on love, and not for the better. It's hard to try to be loving to people when the initial response is suspicion, the second response is surprise, and the third response is fear. I don't know if that's because I live up here in the Northwest where people stay in themselves so much or that I have turned inward.

In the last year, I decided to pursue friendships and people that welcomed them and turn from relationships that didn't, regardless of the supposed proximity of that relationship. That isn't very loving. I'm saying these people aren't worth my love. How did I come to a place in my life where I can do that? I'm not happy about it. I'm just tired of being overtly, publicly criticized.

So today's passage is about Jesus and his three days after supposed death. Jesus, who loved everybody, went through a lot more than I ever will in the name of Love. How did he demonstrate Love to people who were cruel? I don't think him standing there and taking it was the demonstration. I think the internal landscape and his verbal record were his demonstration of Love.

The passages I marked in the book are:

The divine must overcome the human at every point.

Love must triumph over hate.

The persecutors had failed to hide immortal Truth and Love in a sepulchre.

...through the revelation and demonstration of life in God, [Christ] hath elevated them to possible at-one-ment with the spiritual idea of man and his divine Principle, Love.

The last bit of the last sentence caught my eye. The divine Principle is Love. If the divine principle is Love, then I have to work on that. I knew I had to and that this year reading this book would eventually get to it but some how I had procrastinated in my own thought and pushed it away. How do I love anyone including people who don't love me? The only thing that comes to thought is to see them as they truly are in God's reflection and ignore the material evidence. If I had mastered that already, or even gotten close, I wouldn't be here with the book, again.