Making Love in the Universe

No, this article is not about sex, though it is interesting how language can create many meanings.

What I want to write about today is about hardship and suffering and love.

I was thinking about how across the globe many people are born into a life of incredible hardship and suffering. And there is no way out. There aren't any choices. You live on the street. And that's it. What does it mean? What is the value of that? What is the point?

I remember reading in Lawrence Anthony's book The Last Rhinos where there was a band of children. No parents. They lived on the streets. They danced. The youngest of them were amazing dancers. They expressed joy in the world having nothing, not basics of life, not even parents.

And there are millions who suffer, who have a life of suffering, an entire life.

I remembered reading in one of Robert Monroe's books his remembrance of some of his past lives. In one of them he was a nomad, traveling with his wife and children. His family was slowly dying, one by one from the plague. They arrived to a city hoping to get help, but they were refused entry because of the plague. They camped in a tent just outside the city. He sat outside the tent watching the stars in trepidation to go inside the tent to see who else in his little family had died. In those moments under the stars he felt the vastness of the universe, his oneness with the whole, the incredible energy and presence of God.

In that lifetime, it's how he died, having had his first experience of the oneness. That was his learning in that lifetime.

In those moments, decades, lifetime of hardship and suffering, it's those small moments of insight that are significant, that matter in eternity.

And they are all moments about love, about oneness, about the realization of God.

In the end, the means, the methods of learning--the hardship, the suffering, the pain--are all discarded and forgotten. What remains is the love. The realization that, at the end, in truth, that's all there really is, that is real: love.

So, in the strangest way, that hardship and suffering and torment of the human experience, is the making of love in the universe. Knowing God, knowing oneness, expanding God's love.