Meditation Part III

Meditation: Part Three - Love

As a gift in my childhood for my Catholic Confirmation — one of the seven sacraments of the Church (the one whereby you are to receive the Holy Spirit, and thereby wisdom) — my mother gave me my own personal Bible, embossed with my name on the cover.

Once sometime in the 1970s, after hearing a reading at church from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, I was awestruck by the message in a way that had surpassed any other reading I had previously heard. I didn’t have a pen, so I had to try to memorize the cite in my easily distracted kid’s head. 

When I got home, I went to my bedroom, laid on my bed and hunted through my Bible for the magical, powerful, unambiguous and authoritative words of love I had just experienced, anxious that I might have forgotten the right book or chapter from which to begin my search.

Upon finding 1 Corinthians 13, I read the passage over and over and continued to resort to it. It remains today my most cherished passage anywhere in the Bible.

Accordingly, I’ve put Paul’s words into my meditation circuit; while not included within Easwaran’s suggested list of passages, I’m sure if he were alive today that he would have approved.

A few months ago, I had read Ajahn Jayasaro’s short (52 pages) book “On Love.”   [As previously posted, he is one of my favorite monks of the Thai Forest school of Theravada Buddhism.]

Rather than extolling the virtues of love from cover to cover in his brief book, Ajahn Jayasaro spends a fair portion of the work on the trivialization or cheapening of the word “love” that occurred in the English language — i.e., “I love [this movie, food, clothes, activity, etc].” 

In contrast, he speaks of the real love of selfless universal compassion that does not discern or distinguish; the Buddhist term for this is “lovingkindness.” For him, even the love of family, friends, country, etc. may be perfectly worthwhile and with merit, but they do not represent the higher form of love, as they are naturally either innate, self-serving, exclusive or a combination thereof.

It’s understandable that my son’s friends coined the phrase #lovelikenicky, as his open sincere non-judgmental love and compassion extended across humans whether close friends and family or complete strangers.

"Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love." John 4:8

With that, Paul’s words ...

13 If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.

11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.

12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror [darkly/dimly*], then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

* “darkly” or “dimly” is understandably inserted in some translations; mirrors at the time of Paul would have been polished metal, as the arrival of glass mirrors did not occur until the 3rd century AD