I Am Love

Before we are born, our Creator plants this song in every heart: “I Am Love.”

This is no affirmation for what we want to be, but a welcoming of who we already are. Close your eyes, relax the muscles in your belly, breathe in a slow gentle breath, feeling the words instead of saying them: “I Am Love.” Breathing out, listen to these same words float up from the core of your being: "I Am Love."

Creator does not plant in the human heart the song, "I Love You," but rather, "I Am Love." I Love You is possessive, contracting the heart with a silent demand for private attention. But I Am Love expands the heart with an affection that makes no claim upon its object. Indeed, I Am Love has no object. It is the song of the Self, the all-pervading subjectivity, the triumph of cosmic person-hood.

Only because our being cries I Am Love is I Love You possible. Maybe i don't listen to this song for fear of being consumed in a terrible sweet fire. Perhaps i want desperately to separate myself, to articulate my special voice in an attempt to impress you. Yet this effort arises from an anxiety to become somebody - when, in fact, I already Am.

My identity as "somebody" is actually self-limiting. "Somebody," the separate me, arises as a subtle layer of fear, forming its own bubble in the ocean of our wonder. Thus my ego is made of the very fear that my ego might dissolve! i am afraid of falling: of plummeting back into the ocean of what is raw, unprocessed, un-created; of drowning in a love that had already consumed the cosmos before i ever came to be.

The honey was here before the flower. Love was here before my duty or devotion. Love is the primordial explosion, the light source of original innocence. Dust particles are made out of love. Valence shells are waves of love in an atom. The black hole swallowing billions of stars and gushing them out through worm holes into other galaxies, is a cauldron of love. Love is the energy of creation, and there is nothing i can do about it. My good deeds won’t add one particle to the infinite love that already Is. Therefore, my work is to hug everything just as it is.

What would happen if i let go of every effort to love? What if, even for the duration of a breath, i disappeared in the silent ocean of creation’s first Word, "I Am Love"?

No worry.  God's Word articulates me more fully than i articulate myself. God's Love sings me as a wave in its ocean, as a facet sparkling in the diamond of infinite beauty. The more i surrender to the Holy One, the more God becomes uniquely Me. Ham'sah, I Am He! This is the secret of Divine Love.

A glimmer of sunlight on the water does not worry whether it lasts an instant or a thousand years. It sparkles and dissolves, sparkles and dissolves, ever born, ever disappearing. I Am like that, each glimmer of me utterly unique, lasting but a moment, yet shining from the one eternal sun.

What is the sound of my heart beat? "I Am Love." What is the rhythm of my breathing? "I Am Love." Maybe the world gets dark for a little while, maybe a few clouds of illusion and fear pass over me. So what? The only real problem is, i forgot to begin this day by loving who I Am.

Humans are the only creatures vain enough to imagine that loving themselves is selfish. How could i love anyone else if every cell of my blood, flesh, bone and marrow were not already filled with the ocean of Love? Whisper it, friend, “I Am Love,” first like a secret, then like a bell on the porch of the temple, then like a storm that carries everything away.

Let God sing “I Am Love” through your body, with each heartbeat from dawn until noon, from noon until sundown, through the vigil until another dawn. By this song, creatures create themselves, the way breath flows all night without the dreamer’s effort. But we are not dreaming any more. We are awake.

Gratefully being what we cannot help but be, we do God's work without the slightest doing. Even a fly sings, "I Am Love," and becomes a fly. The fly is just a fly, of course, but the Being of the fly is God.

 

Image: Stefan Lochner, Madonna of the Rose Garden, 1440