"The expulsive power of a new affection." I didn't create that sentence. I wish I had. It's by Thomas Chalmers, as a title of one of his sermons.
Some of the things that beset me--thought patterns, fears, habits--need "the expulsive power of a new affection." I need a new love that throws off those things that weigh me down.
"There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love. We love, because he first loved us." (I John 4:18-19, Revised Standard Version)
"There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banished fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life--fear of death, fear of judgment--is one not yet fully formed in love. We, though, are going to love--love and be loved. First we were loved, now we love. He loved us first." (Same two verses, from The Message)
God loves me, and I can fall in love with who God is and what God is doing.
Jesus belonged to this God so much he was willing to discover his life by giving it up as the man for others.
Treasure is knowing I am loved. Loved by God and by God's hands and feet. Safe in this love, I can leave all behind, and take only this treasure. That is when I fully belong to God. Everything else flows from there.
Beatrice Bruteau, in The Grand Option, has written a helpful word.
"What activates love? What concretely and practically liberates that energy?"
"The real secret of how to activate human energy to make the grand option of giving ourselves to others is this: Human energy in any person is activated when that person is personally loved by another person. The reason we do not have more of our human energy available for loving each other is that it is mostly tied up in protecting and defending ourselves and in our efforts to 'get ahead' or augment ourselves."
"And the reason we are obliged to devote so much energy to efforts to defend and augment ourselves is that we do not experience ourselves--do not have images of ourselves--as adequately valuable, securely worthy and acceptable in our own beings. We identify ourselves in terms of the classes to which we belong and the qualities we possess or lack, and we find ourselves inadequate or inferior, rejected or insecure."
"We react to compensate for this inadequacy and insecurity by treating other people in ways that in turn reinforce their feelings of being inadequate, inferior, and insecure. And they again react to compensate themselves by passing on the evil to those in contact with them."
"To break this chain reaction, what is needed is someone who can enable other persons to realize and experience themselves as utterly worthy, valuable, adequate, and secure. This is what personal love does."
"Once one person loves one other person in this way and the one loved accepts and is convinced of the love, and thereby experiences security and liberation, the chain of inadequacy-compensation is broken and another type of chain reaction is started. The one loved experiences a great release of tension, a huge relaxation of all the barriers built up for protection, and a letting go of the aggressive operations used for augmentation. All this becomes unnecessary, and the energy that had been bound up in these defensive and offensive devices is liberated in joy and happiness."
"This joyous energy immediately goes out in love to other persons. It wants to give itself to other persons. It makes the option to be united to them. We have just the opposite of the compensation chain. The one liberated by love now loves others, and each of them, being liberated, loves still others, and the love and liberation spread."
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