Advent Week 4

Love

Being able to experience joy leads to an experience of the highest love.

Hope, peace, joy, and love are the steps we take each year to the ultimate experience of the birth of Christ Jesus within us. This is a continual birthing process not bound by our idea of time and space. It is a personal inner process preparing us for the year ahead. At this time in the cycle of the year we prepare for this birth process; the more concerted our effort the more powerful will be the birth.

If we were able to grasp something of the secret of joy last week – the inner deed that is not a noisy expression but a gentle knowing of who we really are – this leads to an experience of the highest love, agape. This love transcends everything that separates us from each other.

“Love enables us to extricate ourselves from ourselves and actively live our way into another person.” Rudolf Steiner

What prevents us from actively living our way into another person? Usually it is our aversion to something about them. It is important to identify any dislike we can feel for each other – if we are honest we know there is always something that annoys us about other people, even those we love deeply. Notice it, name it, and look for ways to overcome it, recognizing that this activity takes place in our soul. As Einstein wisely said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

If we are to overcome any aversion we have to others, we can only do so with our spiritual faculties not our instinctive soul faculties. We begin by identifying what prevents us from actively living our way into another person, then, we simply step over it. With imagination we can surround them with the warmth love, we can listen intently to what they are saying, which can inspire us to respond in a way that makes them feel accepted, and together we can experience the intuition that transcends differences. In this way we experience the love that created the Universe. This creative love spoke the Word, the Logos, that brought everything into being, as St John begins his Gospel “In the beginning was the Word.”