What exactly is salvation? I believe that salvation has such a multidimensional theme that it is hard to nail it down with the hammer of simplicity. So instead of going in depth with the multitudes of meaning I am going to focus on the one that I feel holds steady with the message that I am trying to deliver with these words. The salvation that I speak of welcomes the gift of a new heart, accompanied by a newfound spirit when speaking of Love.
It is insistent that Love holds supremacy over all else in the spiritual life. Love is supreme over knowledge, austerity, contemplation, and prayer. Love in fact is the spirit of life, and without it all the other movements of the spirit, however lofty, are emptied of substance and become mere illusions. The more lofty these movements appear to be, the more dangerous the illusion.
Love, of course, means something much more than mere sentiment, much more than token gestures and obligated generosity. Love means an interior and spiritual identification with one’s self, as well as, all other souls, so that no one is regarded as an “object” to “which” one “does good.”
It is a fact that good done for someone, as in regards to an “object” carries little to nil spiritual value. Love looks at all souls as one’s other self, and loves all with immense humility, discretion, reserve, and most important reverence, without which no one can presume to enter into the sanctuary of another’s subjectivity. From Love such as this, all authoritarian brutality, all exploitation, and condescension must be one hundred percent absent.
The difficult magnitude of truly loving others is easily recognizable in today’s society and that difficulty is never minimized—yet nonetheless it is scrutinized. It is hard to love others if love is to be taken in the full sense of today’s rigid viewpoint. Love demands a complete inner revolution—for without this we cannot come to identify ourselves with other souls.
We have to become, in the complete sense, the person we love. And this involves a sort of death of who we were, a slaying of our own being, or better yet an assassination of our ego. And sometimes no matter how hard we try, we resist the slaying of these demons—we fight back with resistance, with anger, with demands ands ultimatums.
We subconsciously seek any convenience to break away and escape the difficult task. But in the end when we have finally shed the labels of our old selves the Love of God will reign supreme in our soul. And from there even the sky becomes limitless as to the capacity of genuine Love.
We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject. For both have labored in the search for truth and both have helped us in the finding of it.
St. Thomas Aquinas
It is time to conclude this post, but not without a new sort of prayer. A prayer created with collective thought. Let this be a new sort of communion between all souls. It is at a point where the inner development of man is in grave danger of losing all spiritual inheritance and it is my hope that some may be able to recover the uprightness resting in their inner being from this prayer. Let us call this “The Prayer of Transcendent Freedom.” This new prayer must arise out of the imminence of Love’s mercy.
As we are soon to walk away from these words, let us be aware of the Love that unites us in spite of all of our real differences, and that of emotional friction. All of the these things at the surface of us, are nothing compared to the reality in the depths within us, the reality of Christ moving through our Spirit as we speak, and the reality of God’s Love coursing through our veins at all times, whether those times are good or bad. Because in the end we are all creatures built by Love.
And now as I try and speak something that moves from the depths of my heart, I ask you to concentrate on the Love that is inside of you, that which is in us all.
Dear God,
All souls are one with You. It is You who have made us one with You. You have taught us that if we open our hearts to one another, You will dwell in all of us. Please help us to preserve this Love and to fight for Love with all of our hearts. Help us all to realize there is no such thing as understanding if there is mutual rejection. Oh God, by us accepting one another wholeheartedly, fully, and completely, we accept You, and we thank You, because we adore You. We love you with our entire being, because our being is in Your being, our spirit has its roots in Your spirit. So fill us then with Love, and let us always be bound by love as we all go our separate ways for the day, united in one Spirit that proves Your presence in the world. Which shall make all witness the reality of Love that is You. You are Love therefore Love is King. Love will overcome, just as bearing witness to You within, we find salvation, and salvation is Love. And Love always wins.
-Ryan Love