Agape is our “Access”

When I began exploring “agape” as a spiritual power, I wanted to do more than just intellectual exploring. So for the last couple of years, I’ve started morning prayer time by focusing on my new understanding of Romans 5:5 (using my own translation -- “the agape of God has been poured into the center of our being by the Holy Spirit given to us.”) I open myself up to receive a sense of the spiritual flowing of the agape of God.

Last November, during such a practice, I had an intense Spirit-filled experience. Although it’s a little difficult putting into words, the best I can do is say that I “sensed” agape as “access.” For 2 days after that original experience, I prayed about what it meant to have “agape as access.” On that 2nd day I “sensed” that agape had brought me access to spiritual “manifestation” of God’s Presence. The word “manifest” actually appeared in my awareness.

Then the next day, I sensed that I was being led to my book shelf, to a book that I originally read in 1965. That book was Love, Power, and Justice by Paul Tillich; I opened the book and on pg. 33 found this:

"… agape enters from another dimension into the whole of life and into all qualities of love. One could call agape the depth of love or love in relation to the ground of life. One could say that in agape ultimate reality manifests itself and transforms life and love.”

Reading the word “manifests” had a powerful impact on me! When I saw the way he connected agape and divine manifestation -- used in the same way that it had come to me in prayer -- I was convinced that a breakthrough had come to me. In the weeks that followed, I became increasingly aware of the importance of this to my morning prayers. Finally as Jan. began, I decided to start this blog dedicated to exploring agape as a spiritual power that God gives us as our access to the manifested divine Presence.

That last sentence has become for me a verbal ‘touchstone.’ Because I believe that the Reality of God is so far beyond the awareness of humans that we need a way of access. That is, unless God manifests in some way to us, we have no spiritual awareness. But even at that, we still have to open up to receive that awareness. So then we need some way to access that spiritual manifestation. Such access also can only come from God. That’s how I now understand Paul’s message to the Romans that God gives agape to us through Holy Spirit.

I’ve always understood Holy Spirit as an action not a ‘thing.’ So Holy Spirit is seen by humans as the action of God manifesting to our very limited awareness. Because human ability to be aware is so faulty, we need agape as our way to access that manifesting. Agape begins the opening process, but it is still up to us to respond -- in order for the opening up to  divine Presence to continue. But agape is not forced on us, so if we don’t let ourselves be opened -- if we don’t let ourselves become fully awake to Presence -- agape does not work for us.

My exploration during these last 3 months has opened me to allow agape to pour into me as a spiritual power bringing me access to whatever divine manifestation that can come to me. I will continue to report here the results of my exploring.

Exploring the Blogosphere for Agape Talk

Weird things happen when people try to make agape mean some kind of love. When I was putting together ideas to start this blog, I did some searching of blogs to see what others were saying about agape. At first I was a little surprised to find so much variety in listings of hits. By varying just a little what I typed into search engines, I got very different results.

Even when I narrowed the wording for search engines (like blogsearch.google.com) by typing “agape power” instead of just “agape,” I got everything from martial arts, to a financial advisor, to churches and ministries that used “agape” in their name. There was even a blog about learning agape through the therapy provided by pets. A few blogs claimed to focus more on spirituality than on religion, those blogs usually claimed to be non-Christian even though they professed to follow Jesus.

One blog that shares my questioning about translating “agape” as “love” is www.freelygive-n.com by Robin Calamaio. He pointed out clearly the problems people run into by trying to have “agape” mean “divine love” everywhere the word appeared in the Bible. He discovered that obviously there was a great deal of difference in what the various writers meant by “agape” in the differing places in the Bible. Although I disagree with Robin Calamaio on all subjects of religion, I’ve enjoyed our email correspondence.

Some blogs were listed by the search engine even though they never mentioned the word, but the authors had so completely identified “agape” with “unconditional love” that they were listed because the search engine also operated under that same assumption that somehow agape was connected with love. When I searched by using “divine love,” I found some very strange blogs that fit into the category that large book stores call “New Age.”
 
So far I’ve found no one else who considers agape to be spiritual power. Of course, everyone who linked “agape” with “love” had trouble trying to figure out what kind of love applied to agape. There is complete agreement that agape cannot mean what English speakers usually mean by love, so all kinds of adjectives get tacked onto “love” when trying to use it to mean “agape” -- as some sort of way to make it work. But all of those don’t get the point that it just doesn’t work. Originally, “agape” did not mean what people normally mean by the word “love.” In fact, St. Paul was trying to take it in a completely different direction.

I’m hoping that thru this blog I can reach out to find others who are taking an alternative approach to using agape in the modern world, just as it was used in the ancient world.

Be Perfect with Agape

Because I’ve heard many people complain about the way Christian doctrines make people think they have to “be perfect,” I began to wonder what “perfect” really means. Over the years of searching, I’ve finally concluded that such opinions seem to come from a misinterpretation of the actual teachings of Jesus. Especially when we read about his actions, we can see he was trying to relieve people’s anxieties about living and about relating to God.

When we remember that the only group he ever criticized -- the Pharisees -- were the ones trying to make people think they had to practice a huge amount of rules and regulations in order to “be perfect,” we see that Jesus was reacting against that approach to religion. So today, those religious groups who make people think that only strict rules make people “perfect” are just modern-day Pharisees. And so Jesus would be just as upset with today’s groups as he was with the Pharisees of his day. He wouldn't try to get people to act like some ideal.

So what was meaning? My conclusion is Jesus had a different idea about "being" and about what “perfect” was, and about what life was? We saw evidence of that in Luke 6:35-36 -- "[agapan] your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because God is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful." So something else was going on in the new meaning that Jesus was bringing into being.

What I’m learning about the spiritual power called “agape” is that it’s a gift from God to help us. Agape doesn’t cause us to be more anxious, but it brings us a way to ease out of being anxious. One way it helps us is with the strength to BE what we were created to be. So what does agape show us about being perfect?

Now, we’re ready to ask: what did Jesus mean when he said, after a long discussion about how to treat our enemies, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect”? (Matthew 5:48) The struggles with those words for centuries have caused all kinds of problems. But I think Jesus seemed to be trying to get his followers to deeply comprehend that they were ALREADY PERFECT because of the presence of God with them. That’s what agape helps us see, even in relation to enemies. So he was saying something more like, “You are already perfect, so just BE perfect.” (The meaning changes when all the emphasis is on "be" and not on "perfect.")

So with the spiritual gift of agape -- it is meant not only to help us see we are already perfect, but also to help us be. In a sense, when we truly, profoundly accept the gift of agape as a spiritual power into the center of our being, we are able to relax into being what we were created to be. We don’t need to get all worked up and frustrated trying to act according to some ieal we’re not. As St. Paul said, “Agape is patient and kind.”

Jesus was trying to point out that it wasn’t something for us to intellectually understand, because the reality went so much more profoundly deeper that mere intellect. And it wasn’t something we have to make ourselves believe, because there is no point in making ourselves “become” something we already are. It was more a case of being -- (and being fully aware of our present reality) -- so he said, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.”