What Is Love? | Rev. John Riley

Good morning.  Happy Mother’s Day for all of you mothers out there, all of you people who are a mother to someone.  Welcome, and we’re so grateful that you’re here.  

I love this idea of mother, and I was looking up the metaphysical interpretation of mother, or the divine feminine, and what that really means and how we look at that.  Because in Unity way back when and this is a long — well I don’t know how long ago it was — but we used to have this idea calling God “Father Mother God” to include both the idea of the masculine energy and the feminine energy.  

And I think we have evolved beyond that because it’s, for me, a little bit too anthropomorphic because God is everywhere present.  But God has both that feminine and masculine energy, that divine energy that’s within every person.  So metaphysically, that idea of the divine feminine in mother is that potential energy that we give birth to, that energy that is, that harmonic and creative and nurturing energy that’s within each person, that’s within each of us, so having that ability to draw that out and express that and turn to the wisdom of the heart, to the wisdom of love.  

That’s really for me what this day is all about, is that idea of being an expression of love, being an expression of that divine feminine, of that intuition, of that potential energy that’s within us, that creative, harmonizing, nurturing energy because that is how we, if we lived more from that imagine how life, what life would be like, if you had more of that nurturing energy within you and allowed that to express.  

So, today is Mother’s Day and I thought I would do something a little bit different.  I have my mom’s book, Color This Day Beautiful, available in the Unity Palo Alto bookstore — thank you very much and any bookstore near you.  Sorry mom, I just dropped your book.  But I thought I would read a couple of poems from here, maybe three if I can get that long.  Each poem I tell you is a talk in and of itself — excuse me.  But I’d love to — Is that okay with you?  Okay, good.  Thank you.

Love Is

So, the first poem, Love Is, by Joyce Riley:

Love is compassionate and kind.
It does not judge but is not blind.
Love does not abuse or deceive itself
but is ready to give and receive of itself.
True love is never false or beguiling.
Divine love is the face of Spirit smiling.
Love is sharing, caring and undemanding,
intimate but still expanding.
Divine love sees all with no fault to find,
is infinite yet undefined.
Love can’t be moved or stayed by force.
Within, around, below, above all is God
and God is love.

Thank you.  Thank you for saying that.  Thank you, mom, for that poem.  

Let’s just breathe into this lesson for us here today.  I want to start by, at the end, start with that last line, that last line that says, all is God and God is love.  God is love.  Of all of the attributes and nature of this thing which is the allness of life, love and wisdom that we can’t really define, love is one of those expressions that helps us define it and one we’re so used to and so connected with, that idea of love.  

The Harmonizing Energy

Now, love goes beyond understanding, although in our human consciousness, we have this idea of love as being an attraction perhaps, or love is being something that when two people hold a romantic experience.  Those are all aspects of it, but love is so much more than that.  Love is the harmonizing energy.  

I remember Dr. Maya Angelou, once when she was asked by Oprah, “What’s your favorite word?”, love.  Then she went on to talk about love.  I don’t know, I’m not sure, but I think it’s the energy that holds the stars in the firmament.  I’m not sure but it’s that energy that creates the birds and the fleas and me.  It’s that loving energy, that creative energy that flows through us.  That expression of love is what we’re here to experience.  

Now, when you think of it, and God is love and love is all there is, perhaps you might come to, what comes up often in our human experience is our neighbors, you know, the neighbors in our consciousness, yeah-but, the yeah-but’s.  Anybody know the yeah-but’s.  “Yeah but, what about this?”  Or the neighbors across the street, “Hey wait a minute.  Hold on just one second because I didn’t choose this.  This isn’t a loving expression in my life.  If God is love how can all of these things that are happening in the world today be happening?  How can the atrocities that are happening in the Ukraine be happening?  How can the hunger that’s happening in our own country be happening?”  

It’s these yeah-buts that take us away as personalities, as egos from that allness of life, love and wisdom.  If we came back to that idea of love, that harmonizing energy, that creative energy that flows from us that’s birthed through us.  

What is Sin?

I spoke a little bit about this idea when I was talking about sin a couple of weeks ago.  Sin is not a word that you hear very often in Unity, but we have a very specific definition to it.  It’s not the sin that you grew up with in other traditions.  It is the idea of simply forgetting, losing track of that concept that God is love and God is in you and you are loved and you are that expression of love.  Sin is simply a missing of the mark of that truth.  It’s a thinking that we are all separate.  It’s a thinking, of getting, going over to the yeah-buts and saying, “Hey my gosh, did you hear what happened today?” and having that conversation.  It’s getting distracted from that.  

After I said that, someone wrote a comment that said they would like me to talk about sin as a lack of love as it teaches in the Course of Miracles.  And I went back to the Course of Miracles and went through it again because I don’t think that’s quite the right interpretation.  Sin isn’t a lack of love because love is always present, love is everywhere present as God is everywhere present.  That infinite flow of love is always there within you if you’re willing to open up to it.  So, sin is more, instead of a lack of love, rather it’s again that forgetting love, being distracted by it.  

I went back and this is actually what it says at the beginning of the book, somewhere in the beginning of the book.  It says “The course does not aim to teach the meaning of love for that is beyond what can be taught.  It does aim, however, to remove the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence which is your natural inheritance.”  Love is.  God is. And the error is forgetting that, is getting distracted by that.  The task, then, is to get back to that idea.  

Awareness

So, I came up with an acronym, it’s the AHH acronym.  A.H,H.  Everybody together.  AHH.  Doesn’t that feel good?  Okay, my job is done.  Let’s go, let’s go home.  So A, awareness.  It all starts with awareness.  What happens when we get distracted, we get triggered is that our amygdala, that lizard brain that sits right on top of the spinal cord there, it receives the first, all of the senses that come and go right through that amygdala and that’s where we get triggered.  That’s where the fight/flight/freeze mechanism is.  That’s where our emotions, our strong emotions get generated from.  So, the first thing that happens is that we get scared.  We get afraid.  We get, that leads to being hurt, or angry, or frustrated simply by hitting that sensor.  

Sometimes we say, “Well I can’t have any fear, Unity is about not having any fear” but that’s not true.  Fear is helpful at times.  When there is a saber-tooth tiger coming at you — Anybody have a saber-tooth tiger coming at them, metaphorically, anybody have a saber tooth tiger?  Yes, there we go. — We all have our saber tooth tigers coming at us and that is when fear is helpful.  It’s a warning sign.  It’s like okay, I need to do something different.  What is the challenge is, is our stories around the fear.  Anytime we start taking that fear and identifying with the fear, now we’ve made that fear who we are.  “I can’t do that because of this”.  

Fear stops us to express that divine energy.  It stops us from creating.  That harmonizing energy is just stopped in its tracks because of that mountain of fear that we put into there.  That’s natural for a human being in thousands and thousands of years of evolution.  The goal is not to get rid of the fear.  The goal is to acknowledge, okay, there is some fear there.  That’s awareness.  What if you had that awareness, “Oh, I’m angry, I’m frustrated”, what is it really about?  “Oh, it’s fear”, fear of not being good enough, fear of I don’t deserve the love, fear of doing something wrong, getting fired, getting kicked out of the tribe to hunt on my own and face that saber tooth tiger all on my own.”  That’s the ingrained pattern that’s within our human consciousness.

But the awareness realizes.  With the awareness we can see, “Oh, there’s the fear and I have a choice on how I react or respond to that fear”.  Courage is applying that love in the face of fear.  It doesn’t mean there isn’t any love.  It just means I am going to move forward anyway.  I am going to step forward anyway and I am going to try it and I may fail.  I may fail miserably time and time again but every once in a while, I will succeed, and those successes are wonderful.  And I wouldn’t have had that success if I didn’t try and fail.  

So that first A in our acronym is awareness and realizing that we have choice, choice in our thoughts.  Once we realize that and are aware of that then we can do something different.  

Healing

The first H in our acronym is healing.  What happens whenever we have that fear, there is usually something back there that is generating it.  It could be something from our childhood or something from last week or early this morning at two o’clock or whenever, whatever it happens, something that is bubbling up in us that is asking for healing. That’s really all it is.  It’s asking for love.  It’s asking for that harmonizing energy.  It’s asking for that creative thought, perhaps to create something new in life, perhaps to move in a different direction or maybe try something new.  

So, the healing comes in at that point.  And once you are aware that there is some pain or issues then you can look at what needs to be healed and you have to keep looking back, in back of that to see what’s really going on.  You can ask the question, “why am I upset about this?”  Whatever your answer is, you can ask the question, “why am I upset about that?” until you keep going back, until there is nothing left to, “Oh okay, it’s just a sense of feeling of I’m not good enough.  I am not worthy.”  And so, we’re blocking all of that divine energy, the harmonizing energy of love.  

Healing is the practice in which we do.  And there’s so many ways in which we can do it from the idea of forgiveness.  This is the primary practice that has so many ways in which you can do it, but the bottom line is forgiveness is simply a letting go of the fear and reclaiming your inner power.  

If I was to net it out that is really what it is.  It’s letting go of the situation of the stimulus that’s out there that triggered my amygdala, that pushed my button, and replacing it with love, reclaiming my inner power.  It’s not an external activity.  It all happens in here, in the heart, and in the mind.  

I love this idea of releasing and renewing.  We just went through a Lenten season where we went, every day we released something and in that space that we released, we created something by renewing our mind and our consciousness.  You can watch that.  You can do that forty-day practice.  It’s on our website on our home page.  You can just scroll down and find our release and renew section and it will take you to the videos.  

It reminds me of what Paul, the apostle Paul, was saying when he said, “Don’t let the world around you force you into its own mold but let God remold your mind from within”.  Remold your mind from within.  That’s our practice, is shifting our awareness in consciousness so that we are aware of the fears and enfold and bring in that shadow and just make it a part of us and say, “Okay there it is.  Now with courage I am going to still move forward.  With courage I am going to heal.  With courage we’re going to express more of that divine energy.”  

Eric Butterworth talked about this in one of his lectures and he said — I don’t want to lose my place.  I got too many things – “This idea of remolding your mind, this is to awaken the divine feminine, the wisdom to believe the heart.  You are intended to be not just a reflector but an innovator.  You are not just a mind computer to be programmed with facts but a creative imagination to give birth to them.”  That idea that we are here to express that creative harmonic energy.  

And I think – you know, I was listening to a podcast the other day where a marketeer was talking about the idea to marketers, to people in marketing school or at a university taking an art degree.  He basically said we are all artists.  We are all here to create.  And we can get up in the morning and create a day that’s like, “Oh, I’ve got to get up and go to work.  I’ve got to go back to the grindstone” and we can create an experience of being in the grindstone and coming home and unwinding with a glass of scotch or whatever.  And then on the weekend, then I can have fun.  

That’s the industrial age mentality that we built.  But that is a choice.  Our choice can be, “I am going to come in and go to work and be creative.  I am going to go to work and find new ways to express love, to express harmony, to express the wisdom of my heart”, even in the face of all of those yeah-buts, even in the face of all of that.  

Harmonizing

The second H is harmonizing and it’s coming from your higher self.  And for that, I would like to read a poem, the second poem by my mom called The Change to Love.  We will get to that one. 

The Change to Love, by Joyce Riley.  

Maybe we can’t change the world,
but we can make a start
by meeting face to face
and joining heart to heart.
Maybe we can’t change each other
but this I know is true.
I can change myself
just by loving you.   

Our practice isn’t to change the other person.  It’s to love the other person.  It’s to send that harmony to another person.  It’s to hold and see that divine consciousness in another person even when they’re being … knuckleheads? – if that’s okay, that’s okay to say?  It’s spiritual.  Spiritual knuckleheads. —  In the face of all of that, is to create that harmony within you because that is what changes the world.  

When we raise our consciousness, we raise the consciousness of the planet.  We raise the consciousness of the whole.  So, my job is not to change you here on the platform.  I’m giving you some thoughts.  Your job is to change yourself.  My job is simply to love, to send love to people.  Try this this week.  

I was working on this these last couple of weeks.  My job is just to love.  When the kids forget to take the dishes out of their room, I know there’s dishes in their room.  My son woke up in the morning and there was chocolate all over his clothes and his sheets.  He was eating power berries, those blueberries wrapped in chocolate.  They were so good, I know.  I know that is not what he said, but that’s okay.  He fell asleep and there was a power berry loose in the bed and he woke up this morning, “I can’t believe this.  I guess I shouldn’t fall asleep”.  I said, “Well maybe you shouldn’t eat in your room”.  “No, no that’s fine”.  “Well, maybe you shouldn’t eat in your bed.”  “No, no I have eaten”.  Alright.  “Maybe you should put it back in the cabinet before you go to sleep”.  I don’t know but he needs to take care of that.  He’s old enough to understand that, right?  

My job is just to love.  And loving isn’t blind.  Loving may be giving him sound advice and, again, it’s up to him to take that advice.  My job is just to love.  When you start getting frustrated with somebody, when there’s an argument starting to brew, remember, my job is just to love.  

So, it doesn’t mean I have to be affectionate.  It doesn’t mean I am going to go up and hug the people that are mean to me or throwing rocks at me because love is not blind.  Love is not a doormat.  

The Prospering Power of Love

I love, I love Catherine Ponder’s book, The Prospering Power of Love.  And in that book she talks about this idea, this healing mode to create harmony within yourself and in a relationship and that is to write a letter from your higher consciousness — in Unity we might call that the Christ consciousness, the spark of divinity, your higher self, whatever you want to call it — your higher consciousness to their higher consciousness, even when they are being knuckleheads.  You are not writing to their ego.  You are writing to their higher consciousness which knows only love, which knows only God, that spark of divinity that’s within that other person.  You write a letter to that spark of divinity expressing your love to that, that aspect of them.  

It’s amazing the stories that she writes about in the book, about how that has changed relationships.  Some relationships have moved on.  Others have come together, how it creates a different mindset in business.  Most of which, the case studies she goes off of are business people who are in business with other people and who are having an issue and finding some resolution by that practice.  

Really, it gets the mental, the physical, you are writing things down.  It really gets it into your consciousness so that you show up differently, so that you show up more from that harmonic energy within you, from that harmony, that joy within you.  It’s combining that higher self and speaking to that higher self within you.  

The Circle of Love

I am going to end with the final poem, Love is a Circle.  And our affirmation as well is written by my mom.  I need to find it here.  There it is.  Circle of Love.  

Circle of Love, by Joyce Riley.

Love is a circle which expands
heart to heart and hand to hand.
Though ever constant at the center,
love makes room for all to enter.
More than a circle, love is a call.
Love is God embracing all.  

That circle of love is what we’re here to do and what we’re about.  If I were to net out what Unity Palo Alto is, it’s to be a spiritual community, it’s to be that circle of love where we come together and support each other and love each other through that harmonic energy.