The Cross of unselfish love

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The wisdom of the Cross is the wisdom of unselfish love, which is the wisdom of the Holy Trinity unveiling purifying love, enlightening love through love and love’s God-centred glorification of God through God.  It is not only that love’s glory is revealed to be wisdom’s divine intent, but that the glory of love is also the way love is revealed through glorification.  The Cross reveals unselfish love that does not seek its own, but this same love is what inspires the Father’s love of the eternal Son, together with the Son’s reciprocation of that love, discerned in the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit imparts the uncreated energy of love when proceeding from the Father, abiding eternally in the Son, unveiling the unfettered completeness of unselfish love.

The revelation of the Cross of love reveals love to be the true meaning of all that there is.  Such love is costly but does not count the cost, leaving no trace of self-interest.  Love abides in love, resting in love’s completeness.  Love liberates all that arises, leaving neither confusion nor division.  Given that love is both the scope and the meaning of revelation, love loves without attachment nor detachment, being free of every fixation ‘for’ or ‘against.’  Love is not indifference either, but uncreated fire inspiring hearts with tongues of flame.  Love is radically uncontrived when it expresses true purity of heart.  Love is not self-interested when communion is without confusion and union is without division.  Division excludes, whereas love is truly integral once it transcends the closures of self-love.  Love is not conceptual when it no longer tries to grasp or reify its over-flowing energy, energy that is uncreated but creative, enlightening the heart.  

Love’s dynamic energy is uncreated not created and so deifies all who partake in it.  Love no longer goes out after one distraction or another, but lovingly abides through love in love, resting in recognition of love’s unrestricted completeness.  Glory is the pinnacle of love’s wisdom, but mysteries of glory remain hidden if self-centred confusion is still replacing communion, dividing what in God is one.  Love’s enlightening intent cures self-love by opening every kind of self-interested love up to unselfish love that seeks not its own.  Such love is not a disinterested abstraction but a passionately dispassionate flame of uncreated fire, unperturbed yet overflowing with fulness of joy.  Love frees love from every last fixation on a lover or a beloved, opening love to love beyond all self-centred loves.  Wisdom’s cures of self-love are revelation of love’s glory as God’s own God-centred glorification of God in Holy Trinity.

The decisive experience of love does not remain in love with love but empties love of love’s fear-driven grasping at love, expanding instead into love’s unrestricted loving openness.  Love opens to love that knows no loss or lack of love, love whose completeness completes our incompleteness without effort or strain.  The uncreated grace of such love is given freely and unconditionally to all but fear resists because for fear, love feels like death, death to its compulsive need to retain control.   Preferring effort and achievement, self-centred religion pushes the grace of love away to a safe distance where it can no longer save.  Love is read down to the limits of what self-love can control, so that the bliss of love can be safely  postponed.  Grace is a body of light whose glory raises glory to glory, but there is also a body of love which is illumined and glorified as resurrection is graced by glorification.  The body of love is the transfigured body of ecstatic joy, whose dynamic energy is the uncreated light of the illumined heart.  

Love’s awareness of divine presence is revealed through God’s Name, ‘I AM,’ but the Name also establishes the heart in the spontaneous presence of deifying awareness, conjoining ‘I’ and ‘AM.’  The Kingdom of glory is a glorification of God’s Name, love awakening to love through love.  Nothing impedes expansive love when love’s encircling of love by love cures love of self-love. The Father is the source of origination but has no origin, whereas God the Son is ‘I AM’ from ‘I AM,’ light from light, God from God with God.  The Father’s love of the Son is reciprocated by the Son in whom the Spirit abides.  This encircling love gathers into divine love all who turn and see, sharing deifying love with all.  Gravity is the name modern physics has given to visible theophanies of this love, love wedding our planets to the sun, our sun with her galaxy, our galaxy with our galactic group, galaxies encircling galaxies, expansive love revealing love’s graceful expansive expanse, uncreated love expanding without end.  Social cohesion or social solidarity are two of the names modern sociologists have given to love in social domains, but love has many names in many realms and every realm is a veiled theophany of deifying love.

Love is timeless and infinite, fathomless and incomprehensible in its ineffable depths.  Faith and hope fall away when the glory of love is revealed, but when glory is distanced, faith and hope return to the dance.  Love remains love in glory, so there is nothing to be renounced, nothing to be attained.  Love is perfect freedom, so timeless awareness of love’s freedom does not waver or wander when glory reigns.  Love transcends all frames of reference, so fear’s constraints fall away.  Love’s awakened awareness of presence is ever-present in every moment, so love no longer clings to what fear is afraid to lose.  Love’s expanse is uncreated grace whose glory is discerned by wisdom.  Love knows no extremes because it knows no restrictions which condition extreme reactions to extremes.  Love does not come and go but welcomes temporal coming and going into its consummate completeness.  Orthodox Hesychasm calls this deification, but deifying love has many names.  The names do not destroy what love knows, knowing love as love is known by love.  

Love’s way of blessed abiding keeps faith with love’s grace and with the glory of grace in its abiding.  Love is no longer troubled by the strains and stresses of conditioned ways and means, holding to God’s love of God in God at centre in the midst.  It is not our little loves that save or redeem us but love’s saving presence and abiding openness.  Love is already love, so has nothing to lose or achieve.  Love lets be what love reveals, leaping from love to love, unobstructed, still and free.  Love’s openness never wavers, never wains.  So love can trust love, whatever happens, whatever arises.  Love is not bound to ‘this’ or ‘that’, so whatever ‘is’ or ‘is not,’ love sees through luminous translucence to glory without end.  Love’s expanse opens to love’s expanding openness as turning sees and seeing frees.  The Cross of unselfish love is wisdom’s glory, revealing God’s own unselfish glorification of God through God, revealed in countless theophanies of God’s unselfish love.