Looking out

 looking out the window with gratitude, facing west on Dec 18

Love God and keep the commandments (e.g., Deut 7:9*). Note the “and.” 

     Sometimes a vital doorway into life-more-abundant opens through re-reading; this requires letting go of previous interpretation/s and allowing a reincarnation to come into being, sometimes in a flash and other times much more slowly. To read “love” especially deserves frequent re-reading because it’s “many-splendored,” mercurial, sometimes shape-shifting with great speed and other times so slowly. In order to progress in living love, Paul suggests we advance beyond talking and thinking like a child (I Cor 13).

     I’m wondering if my spiritual life gets closeted, cutting off breath, by a semi-conscious belief that love for God enacts by (that is, “equals”) keeping commandments. While the linking term (“and”) might rarely mean “equals,” it usually points to something else. Of course keeping commandments is right and good, but I think that’s not enough when love is getting minimized. And I’m pretty sure that commandments can be followed without love. Responding to the voice, “Do it because I said to!” comes to mind.

     This blunt version (Love God by keeping the commandments) may be needed for childlike understanding; but, importantly, a more mature statement adds: “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your [mind and] heart and with your entire being and with all your might" (Deut 6:5); re-stated in the gospels, "And He [Jesus] replied to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind (intellect)." (Matt 22:37, Amplified Bible Classic Ed.). 

     These scriptures stand out because they capsulize an essence. Ecclesiastes 12 expresses the heart of the matter similarly: 

All has been heard; the end of the matter is: Fear God [revere and worship Him, knowing that He is] and keep His commandments, for this is the whole of man [the full, original purpose of his creation, the object of God’s providence, the root of character, the foundation of all happiness, the adjustment to all inharmonious circumstances and conditions under the sun] and the whole [duty] for every man. (Amplified Bible Classic Edition).

     These pondering have been prompted in part because I’ve been wondering about the “eye of the heart.” Once again, Rumi (Mathnawi, Book V, line 1103, Nicholson’s translation**)

هست آن پیدا به پیش چشم دل  ** جهد کن سوی دل آ جهد المقل (But) that (difference) is manifest to the eye of the heart (spirit): exert thyself, advance towards the heart (spirit) with the exertion of one whose means are small.

     I’m surprised by the results shown on my computer screen when I enter “eye of the heart” because it immediately shows a book title by Frithjof Schuon: The Eye of the Heart. As mentioned in previous blogs, I’ve been reading in his book The Transcendent Unity of Religions but didn’t know of the one titled “The Eye of the Heart.” In searching another of his books on my shelf (Gnosis: Divine Wisdom), I find:

When Christ—in renewing the Law of Sinai, which he came to “fulfill” and not to “destroy”—teaches the love of God, he distinguishes between “heart”, “soul”, “strength” (Torah: “might”), and “mind”; this “love” thus excludes no faculty that unites with God, and it cannot be merely one term of an opposition, as when love and knowledge confront each other. If by the word “love” the Torah and the Gospel express above all the idea of “union” or “desire for union”, they make it clear by the adjectives that follow that this tendency includes diverse modes in keeping with the diversity of man’s nature; hence it is necessary to say, not that love alone draws toward God, but rather that only what draws toward God is love. (p. 83)

     Coleman Barks chose for today, December 18, from Rumi one he titles “What Is Love? Gratitude.” The poem concludes: “Don’t ask what love can make or do./ Look at the colors of the world./ The riverwater moving in all rivers at once” (A Year with Rumi). 

 looking out the window facing east a few days ago, with gratitude

* Deut 7:9 ISV “Know that the LORD your God is God, the trusted God who faithfully keeps his covenant to the thousandth generation of those who love him and obey his commands.”

Eccl 12:12-13 ISV: “There is no end to the crafting of many books, and too much study wearies the body.  Let the conclusion of all of these thoughts be heard: Fear God and obey his commandments, for this is what it means to be human.”

Qur’an 2:165 “But those who believe are more ardent in their love of God” and see the commentary in The Study Qur’an. See also Q 3:31 and commentary.

** Line 1103 can can be seen online: http://www.masnavi.net/1/10/eng/5/1100/ . For expansion of the “heart,” see also the preceding section, especially around line 1065.