Above: The Birth of Venus by Sandro Boticelli
 

Love
by Mervyn Brady

When Love presents itself, our role is to experience it, not to control it or to understand it … we cannot.  We will never understand Love with the mind.  It will always elude our understanding.  We can only experience it.

There is no safe investment in Love. To Love is to be vulnerable and I can almost guarantee that if we Love, our heart will be stretched and possibly broken.  It is because of this that some people choose to live in a self-protected LOVELESSNESS.

If we want to keep our hearts intact, we must not give it to anyone or thing.  Yet we constantly take the risk. Such is our desire for Love. Perhaps the only place we are safe from Love, is the one place where it does not exist … HELL.

In LOVE we get nearer to God by developing the triad that does not try and avoid suffering, but  consciously offers the subsequent suffering to God.  He will take it and make us grow.

The Love between two people is an exact mirror image of the Mystical Union between the Soul and God.  When we encounter a great Love in our life we taste what union with God is like.
 
Most of our Spiritual Guides on Love were celibates.  They did not know what Love and domesticity did to us. Preoccupation or identification with the Beloved can become an obstacle to the Spiritual or inner Life, as they both compete for the same space.
 
Let your Loved One reside inside you, not outside of you.
 
In the beginning we desire the pleasures and delights that the Lover can bring. Desire is the best prelude to pleasure.  Then it changes so we desire the very person.  We move from digesting pleasures to people.  
We must merge and soar with the beloved until the understanding fails and even reason remains outside.
 
Love wills us to venture deeper into the Unknown Regions.
 
Remember, Love is a gift and we pay a rent for it to God.  We are never the freeholders. It is never ours.

 

Venus detail by Sandro Botticelli