Agape as channel for divine permeating

Recently I read through the scripture quotes about agape that I’d included in my Aug. 20 posting. That inspired me during morning prayer to realize that agape serves for us as the channel through which divine Presence permeates our being. So serving as a spiritual channel, agape opens us to the manifesting of divine Presence in our lives.

Also, it is through agape that we are opened to the vastness of divine Presence. So agape opens us up to having a spiritual sensation of divine Presence so vast that it is eternal and formless. And yet agape allows us to participate in that vast, eternal, formless Essence. It is such a spiritual sensation of participating that shows us how we can identify with the vast, eternal, formless Essence.  

That is how agape helps us completely change our sense of identity. We are able to see how to readjust our thinking about identity. Agape helps us start to build a personal identity based on being connected with and participating with divine Presence. Or as the ancient expression put it: each person sees herself or himself as a child of God.

As we let God’s agape work in our lives, it also serves as a channel for spiritual power to flow out to our relationships, and in that sense we serve as a channel for agape to flow in our world. Each of us helps to increase the influence of agape when we let it flow through our actions.

Agape helps us realize that we are participating in something so much more powerful than anything we could have developed by trying to identify as an individual personality. So agape helps us know how much more we are than we ever thought possible.

When I thought about how great that possibility is, I began remembering one of my favorite old hymns. This musical memory took me back to the days before I became aware of the problems with translating ‘agape’ as ‘divine love.’ The hymn was by Charles Wesley and was titled “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.” So I got out my old hymnal and re-wrote the words as follows:

“Agape, all loves excelling. Joy of eternity come to all. / Fix in us your humble dwelling. All your wonders share for all. / Jesus, you are all compassion, pure, agape you are. / Visit us with your salvation, spread to all, near and far. / Breathe, O breathe your spiritual agape in every troubled breast. / Let us all in you inherit, Let us find your promised rest. / You we would be always blessing; Alpha and Omega be; / End of faith, as its beginning, Set our hearts at liberty. / Come, almighty to deliver, Let us all your Life receive. / Pray, and praise you without ceasing, in agape to believe. / Finish then, your new creation; Pure and spotless let us be.”