Episode Four: What Is Love?

In my last episode I talked about my epiphany after seeing the movie Oliver! when I was six years old: That all any of us want is to love and to be loved. I have never stopped believing that.

Yet my life has been filled with the same confusion and pain that most of us have felt: if we want to love and to feel loved, then why is it so hard? Why do we hurt others, and why do others hurt us? And if it *is* so hard, why do we continue to care so much about loving and being loved?

Throughout my life, I asked myself these questions repeatedly. Yet I never seemed to find answers, until I stumbled upon the transformational power of heart-centered practice. That’s when everything changed — including my understanding of what Love is, what Love does, and why Love matters. This is because I became less worried about being loved and more eager, willing, and able to live in Love.  Love with the Big L, that is.

What do I mean by that?

There is a Sufi poet named Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi. Although he lived eight hundred years ago, he is the best-selling poet of the twenty-first century! Just as *Oliver!* gave me my first glimpse at our human longing for love, Rumi has shown me how our myriad messy and marvelous manifestations of human love can illuminate our spiritual journey to understand and live in Love.

Among Rumi’s many poems, there is one that is the most quoted. It contains everything any of us need to know about Love. In fact, it may be the greatest Love poem ever written.

But this is the part that everyone remembers:

    Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing,

there is a field. I will meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”

does not make any sense.

This place, this field—out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing—is Love. With the Big L.

It’s the place where all the things we believe we’re supposed to fear, worry about, be scared of, judge, desire — fade away — and we realize that there isn’t a you and me, an us and them, allies and enemies. We remember we’re all One.

Does this sound crazy? Especially now, when the whole world feels more divided than ever? Think about it. Where does all this division get us? We are told that we are protecting ourselves, trying to make our individual lives or countries better, greater, stronger? And yet, the strongest we can be is when we’re together. When we remember that we are all One.

But how is that possible when we are told that other people are scary or wrong or bad. They can hurt us, take something away from us, even destroy our existence.

Rumi gives us a clue when he says that in that field out beyond all these ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, even the phrase “each other” does not make any sense. In other words, in this field even those we hold the closest, those we cherish, disappear into the knowledge that we are all One. Because in this field, we remember that Love is the essence of all existence.

Anyone who has ever felt this knows the freedom that comes with this feeling. Nothing can touch it and it changes everything about how we move through the world.

There is a plaque on the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, Kentucky. It commemorates the moment when the Trappist monk Thomas Merton had this exact revelation on March 18, 1958. That’s literally what the title of the sign says: A Revelation.

This is how Merton described that revelation.

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud…As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

That moment not only changed Merton’s life, it changed the lives of everyone with whom he shared his revelation.

Anyone who has felt that awakening from this dream of separateness that we call life, anyone who has found Rumi’s Field of Love — even if for a moment — has experienced what it is like to feel fundamentally true and pure and safe and whole and free. To move beyond the limitations of our little lives into a place of oneness. The oneness of Love.

There we remember at last that Love is where we come from and where we are all ultimately going . . . but it is also where we all live, right here and right now.

And there we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that loving most certainly is what we are all here to “do” — just as we also know that Love ultimately has nothing whatsoever to do with “doing” at all.

That is the key.

Merton wasn’t shopping for love in that shopping district. Rumi doesn’t tell us to go find that field so we can do something there. Love isn’t something we do. It is who we are.

But because we are bludgeoned with so many false messages — from all the reasons we should be afraid of one another to all the Hollywood Hallmark fairy tale ideas of “true love — we forget this. . .Thus the need for heart-centered practice.

Heart-centered practice is the way we bridge from the lie of separatedness to the remembrance of Oneness.

We’re not trying to become. We’re trying to remember who we already are.

So, this week, as you move through your life, remember what Merton said: We are all walking around shining like the sun.

You are. As is everyone you love. As is everyone you are being told to fear on the television. As are the people you judge and revile. (And we all do it.)

We are all walking around shining like the sun because Love is the sun and we are its rays. Without us, Love is what? An abstraction. Without Love, we can’t shine.

This is the essence of every heart-centered practice.

Next week we’ll talk about Finding Love AKA remembering who we all really are. The loved and loving of Love. With the Big L.