FAITH WITHOUT WORKS IS FANTASY

Love has no errors, for all errors are the want of love. -- William Law

I think the reason for a "want of love" is the want of knowing what love is. Too many of us are still thinking that the feeling of love should be warm and wonderful and good and happy and uplifting and freeing and joyous and bippity bippity tra la la. If just one of those feelings is missing...uh-oh, not love. In fact, disrespect is hovering near: Why, he/she really doesn't like me...I am utterly innocent, offering nothing but good and happy, etc., etc., etc., and look what I'm getting in return. Dissed. All that in the blink of an eye, the beat of a heart.

Love, to me, is simply nonresistance...to whatever comes my way. Especially the feeling of dissed, which I apparently have an affinity for since I can manufacture the feeling on my next breath. Ruckus always comes running when I get out his leash. Except when he doesn't. I guarantee, without thought, I can feel unloved...rejected...in that instant. After all I do for him.

Sidebar: I used to laughingly say that feeling unloved/unwanted/unneeded/unappreciated must be my favorite place, I go there so often. Imagine my surprise when an unhealthy majority of the people to whom I shared that said, "Me, too!" At least we got a laugh out of it.

Back to my thinking that love is simply nonresistance...which is another word for acceptance, which is another word for surrender which is sometimes known as crash-and-burn. Take it back to that taproot, and it becomes clearer why we'd rather think of love as happy, happy, tra la. 

Surrender is a hard act to want to experience. There is no warm and fuzzy around surrender. 

The paradox is, if we live a nonresistant life, we don't have to surrender...we're there. And one cannot live a surrendered life in a vacuum...there must be a guide, a guiding light, a guiding force. A higher power. To whom we surrendered.

That's the gold in nonresistance...we have given up resisting anything and anybody and found a power greater than ourselves who can and will intervene in our lives in our behalf. (To paraphrase a great teaching.)

On that rock we build our faith...knowing that faith without works is fantasy.

Thank you.