In preparation for the fourth Sunday of Advent:

I.

Love is not a goal to attain.

Love is the power that attains the goal.  Love is the means by which I become more fully the person I was created to be.

There is no self-help course, no do-it-yourself program, by which I can become more loving. Love is a gift of the Spirit of love.

Whether or not we acknowledge it, we live immersed in a sea of love. This sea poured forth in the life of the infant whose memory we honour at Christmas.

We do not need to search for love, or even create the circumstances by which love becomes available to us.

Love is a constant steady energy-force that pulsates through all of the creation that Love brought into existence and which Love sustains.

Love finds expression through human beings, but is not confined to human beings or to any one expression. Love is manifest in the world in myriad forms and manifests in unimaginable profusion throughout all of creation.  

II

There is no one who has ever been born who came into the world completely lacking in the capacity for love.

Therefore, there is no one for whom it is impossible to know God.

The writer of I John says,

let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.

( I John 4:7)

This is an extravagantly expansive image of God and of how human beings may know God. God “is love” and anyone who “loves… knows God.” Love is the definition of God. To love is to know God. To know God is to love.

There are no qualifiers here, no boundaries, no parameters, no hoops to jump through. No one owns the rights to God. Love is not bound to any creed, doctrine, or community. Love is not confined. “Love never ends.” (I Corinthians 13:8)

The power of love crosses all humanly created barriers and divisions. Love creates a level playing field on which all human beings are equal.  

III.

Observing many of the circumstances that take place on the surface of life, it is easy to fall prey to the impression that brutality, suffering and brokenness rule the world.

Christmas challenges us to look more deeply and find the truth beneath the fractured surface of circumstance.

Christmas affirms that planted more deeply than all that seems so wrong, is Love. Love resides in the deepest part of our being, bearing us up no matter how much we may struggle with the details of life.

Christmas suggests that it may actually be the very details and their difficulty, that are the essential ground in which love comes to birth.

Love is born out of the struggle between “yes” and “no”. It is the tension that enables us to go more deeply into life and discover our true nature as beings created in the image of the God who “is love.”

IV.

Love is not something I do to you.

Love is the power of life that resides in me and manifests through me when I remove the obstacles that inhibit the natural flow of this life-force.

Love generates life. Love creates, serves, and reaches out with compassion to the whole of creation, simply because this is what love does. My job is not to generate love as if I had the ability to create such a force. My job is to clear space in my life for love to emerge.

As William Blake wrote in “Songs of Innocence,”

And we are put on earth a little space
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.

There is no task greater than this. No meaning to life other than love. 

The external circumstances within which we fulfill our calling to be instruments of love are much less significant than the love we transmit. It does not matter if we manifest as butcher, baker, or candle-stick maker. What matters is that we live as a loving butcher, baker, or candle-stick maker.   

The holiness of this season is the invitation to enter fully and deeply into the mystery and wonder of our true nature as beings created in the image of Love.