And as usual with me, what I don’t know is what bothers me. Partly, I’m bothered because I’ve been working on this blog for over 2 years and the book for 2 months, and yet I’m just starting to see that I’ve been missing a lot of the depth of spiritual meaning in agape.
What started this latest realization is my recent re-reading of the Bible quotes with ‘agape’ left untranslated. I started to see that the point being made there is this: agape is spiritual because there is the divine intent that humans must act on agape. That is a requirement -- that’s the point of calling the 2 Great Commandments and the New Commandment by that designation. We are created to live by agape. Humans are commanded!
When in my last posting I used a couple of quotes from my 1st draft of Ch. 1 I was expressing ...
“This type of prayer comes as a method for waking up to what is deep within you. It came to me as a deep spiritual sensation that was a way for finding, in the way that the ‘Kingdom Parables’ of Jesus are about finding what is at the true heart of Life. And in a similar way, the act of sending follows from a deep attitude of finding what is truly best for the ultimate well-being of people.”After I had posted that, I read it from the attitude of a reader finding it by exploring the internet. What struck me then was the thought that those words didn’t seem to come from me. They must have been inspired because I don’t know what they mean.
To try seeing what they might mean, spiritually, I strung some of them together and came up with the following:
Agape is meant to “wake us up to what is deep within” -- “at theThat shakes me up, because even though I do believe that agape is at the heart of what is “truly best for the ultimate well-being of people,” I don’t yet have a handle on what that means.
true heart of Life,” and for “finding what is truly best for the ultimate
well-being of people.”
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