God is Infinite Love.
God creates the Universe and gives us life.
And with life God gives us freedom.
We can choose to follow God on the Way of love, wisdom, and knowledge or we can reject God’s call.
That most important clause of this proposition about our freedom - "we can" - is too often misunderstood, overlooked, or read only within the discussion about Grace and justification. We know too well what that clause, "we can", means in the case of evil: both daily chronicle and history tell us more than we need to know about the deserts and the horrors of evil and despair. But what does "we can" mean when we choose to follow love, wisdom, and knowledge ?
In a previous article we have already discussed a most strategic sentence from Isaiah:
(30:15) "in peace and confidence is your MIGHT".
How do we reach such "peace and confidence" ?
By remembering that God is Infinite Love.
We don’t remember that God is Infinite Love, we forget it all the time.
Even when we do not cultivate evil, we forget that the only true reality is the Infinite Love of God. We take the inevitable tragedies of the finite world and the horrors of evil as if they were more relevant than the Infinite Love of God Who creates the universe, and gives us life and Life Eternal. And so we forget that God is Infinite Love, we become obsessed with the finitude of the finite and with evil, and we fall prey to negativity.
In the midst of the absolute Wonder of the Creation we ponder where to find “answers”.
The power of negativity makes us repeat again and again the mistake that the Genesis highlights in clear terms: surrounded by Wonder, we listen to the snake of dualism that suggests to us that “there is more to know” than knowing the Infinite Love of God…and we believe this incredible farce.
This wall of negativity covers the Truth, entraps us in a sequence of ideas and states of mind that ultimately can lead us to ruin.
This means we have to dehypnotize ourselves from any and every negativity. Negativity can be called a blind faith in evil, the blind faith that makes us forget that God is Infinite Love. The Infinite Love of God flows towards the world without intermission, but the belief in negativity stops it from reaching us, acting as a veritable wall.
Only if we succeed in dehypnotizing ourselves from negativity we can understand that the only true reality is the Infinite Holy (HaKadosh Baruch), the Infinite Love, Infinite Life Eternal.
And only that comprehension leads us to "peace and confidence". And peace and confidence lead us to our “might”.
What “might” ? The power of love, for sure. That is, if we understand that the only true reality is the Infinite Holy (HaKadosh Baruch), the Infinite Love, Infinite Life Eternal, we do understand that the Love of God flows towards the world without intermission. This frames our lives in the correct way.
But there is another “might” (although not entirely “other”, since it is still part of love), a power stemming from peace and confidence: the power of prayer, the power to ask ! The prayer of the desperate who blindly believes in evil, who doesn’t know that the only true reality is the Infinite Holy, the Infinite Love, Infinite Life Eternal, is no “prayer” at all, it is like “faith” reduced to mere belief, whose omnipresent shadow is doubt. Instead, the true prayer knows that God anticipates all our needs and that God is only waiting for us to ask. Will this change the “reality” ? Yes and no: no, if we expect that the answers to our needs will be the answers defined by us … but yes, we will be shown a Way. God is not ever going to abandon anybody who is asking for help and listening to the answer.
It is important that we remember, even when we are talking about prayer and God’s Help, that God made us free, and wants us free, therefore God waits for us to ask, and even when we ask and God answers, it is always true to say that faith does move the mountains, but we are always put in the position to choose freely: the answers to our prayers are powerful, but they will not be powerful if we don’t listen and if we don’t choose to walk the Way that is being shown to us. Even the most ecstatic vision that could transform us with its extreme power … must still be listened to!
Moreover, the true prayer is in serenely accepting our duty, i.e. living a life of love, and asking for the power to carry it on. It is serene, because it stems from the knowledge that the only true reality is the Infinite Holy, the Infinite Love, Infinite Life Eternal. By asking, we don’t show first and foremost our needs, but we show that we are aware of our immense faults and that we are aware that only God’s Love can heal our falls and defects.
So, on the whole, a life of love re-centers our actions and words, and prayer re-centers us on God.
The wonder of the Creation is all around us all the time, prayer centers us in the wonder of God all the time.
It seems that we have been given a lot of power !
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