Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places, Part 1

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Valentine’s day is fast approaching. I find it ironic and more than a little heartbreaking (see what I did there?) that the greatest power in the universe has been reduced to a single day of the year. We’ve neutered the mind-boggling idea of a love so strong it can change our world, into a commercial holiday about cards, flowers, chocolate and corporate profits. We have removed any sense of power from the very idea of love. Instead, love is about being unfulfilled and looking for love, only to have your heart broken. In our entertainment, love is unrequited. Love is cruel. Love stinks. Love is about sex. Love is about anything other than an actual change of heart, mind and soul.

Love should be about transformation. When we love, we are transformed. Where once our primary concern was our own well being, now we care more about the well being of another. Where once we only thought about our own education, career, home and material goods, now we are concerned about making sure the someone we love is getting everything they need to live a happy, love-filled life. Love has transformed us. Love urges us to transform others. Love demands we change the world.


The biblical authors understood that love is much more than an interpersonal power (although the power of interpersonal love should not be understated). They knew that love is the power that creates and sustains the universe. Love is God. There is no material reality without it first being loved into being. I know this sounds all cotton-candy fluffy, but I have been convinced for decades that the underlying structure of reality is a single energy source—God, and more than simply “God,” which conjures images of a giant bearded (white) man in the sky. Rather, God is consciously loving energy—so much so that this conscious love warps space-time into physical matter.

The Big Bang happened all-right, but thinking it was simply an explosion of physical debris that eventually formed the universes is short-sighted. Eventually, scientists will consider consciousness as an element on par with gravity, electricity and magnetism. Universal consciousness—Universal Love, is the missing link in a unified theory of everything. It was loving self-awareness that caused the Big Bang in the first place, the way love causes everything inside of us to explode when we meet our one-and-only. It is love that erupts within us when we have children, when we are touched by the lightness of being, and when we are compelled to feel compassion for children in war-torn countries or a homeless neighbor on Seventh Avenue.

Love is permanent. Love always surrounds us. Love is the machinery that fabricates us atom by atom. The gaping holes in our hearts aren’t caused by a lack of love, they’re caused by a lack of awareness of just how much love we are. God is love (1 John 4:8), and God is within us (Luke 17:21), so love is within us. We are love. We need search no further.

Meditation: Show me the love beyond my mind that hides within, so hard to find. Amen.

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