Agape from the human perspective

Each day the way I prepare to write more of my book is by going into a tree area at the far end of a park near my home and meditate on Rom. 5:5. As I’ve mentioned in previous postings, this morning prayer time includes a ritual to open myself to receive agape. This meditation practice has helped me deepen my awareness of agape. But I started this practice almost 3 years before the thought entered my mind to write my book.

That’s how I came to realize agape as a spiritual power that opens up my awareness of divine Presence manifesting to me. But what should have seemed obvious to me, and yet has only become obvious recently, is the point that this is an explanation from the human perspective.

Oh you might say, “Well, duh. What other perspective could we possibly have?” And yet, it’s important not to think it’s anything other than that. My attitude was that something was starting to happen in the morning, and yet there was something wrong with that perception.

So I went back to the Bible to look up the verse. The first mistake I’d made was glaringly obvious. It had to do with the human sense of time. I'd forgotten that the verse was not in the present tense; in fact, what usually gets called past, present, and future are there in that 1 verse: “and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s agape has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” (Rm. 5:5 New Revised Standard Version) What I’d forgotten is this -- Paul said, “has been poured....”

The second mistake came to me when I realized: God’s agape is not limited by time. Agape is ‘there’ in human hearts, agape has always been ‘there,’ agape will always be ‘there.’ The change that has come to me has to do with the eternal essence of agape.

So what should be obvious to me is the flow of agape from the center of my being has always been happening. Just because I started to become aware of it does not mean that it just started. That’s my own perception problem.

That’s merely another example of how people tend to see identity. What I needed to realize is I could not find my identity with God’s Presence as long as I expected an event that I thought was somehow God 'coming to my ego-identity.' But instead, what agape was doing for me was opening me up spiritually -- I merely had not been open to that awareness. So I needed to be made aware.

I’d tried to explain that this way in a Nov. 22, 2011 posting: “I came to realize that through that action of God's agape, (which came to me as a spiritual sensation that I was being ‘caringly’ and ‘lovingly’ drawn into a close, intimate relationship of divine Presence) I was experiencing an opening up in a deeply devotional way to becoming increasingly aware of a Presence that is always ‘with me’ because there is no way that the eternal Presence is ever ‘not there.’ Any sensation of ‘not there’ is strictly my own lack of awareness, and nothing more.