Looking For Love? Here's How to Find It

Here's a hint: We, you, and me – we ARE love.

What do I mean by that? That’s what we’re all going to learn more about with our June theme, Higher, Deeper, Love.

Rev. Michael Auch kicked it off Sunday with All the Love We Cannot See, reminding us of a fish named Fred — introduced to us last month by Rev. Larry — a fish on a lifelong quest to find water. Fred had no idea he was immersed in, swimming through, and sustained by water.

That’s what love is. When we talk about love in Science of Mind, we aren’t talking about romantic love, or as Rev. Michael described, loving a person, a thing, or an idea.  

Love is the energy that connects us, the thing Ernest Holmes described as impossible to destroy and only possible to ignore. We can use love as another word for Spirit, God, energy, universe, or whatever you name the force that runs through everything, including you. There is no shortage of it. It just is.

Hearing Trueman sing Foreigner's chart-topping I Want to Know What Love Is brought back what longing feels like, and within this context, my thought shifted from longing as desire for something missing to: Longing is love looking for itself in the wrong direction. Rev. Michael's talk reached beyond that longing, to the realization that what we're searching for isn't hiding. We just operate like Fred.

(Interesting side note: songwriter Mick Jones said the song came to him at 3 a.m. when everyone else was gone; he considered it a gift sent through him and said it was probably written entirely by a higher force.)

Love: A Concept You May Underestimate

Years ago I was in a work-related workshop when the speaker said that bell hooks' All About Love was the best business book she'd ever read. I thought it was a self-help book, so I decided to re-read it. And I got it.

Love as a way of operating.

Whether in a workplace, in a community, or in a life. It's rigorous practice. Love is showing up with intention. It's telling the truth. It's choosing connection over self-protection when that's harder. hooks was making a case for love as an ethical framework. That combination, being love, and an ethical framework - that's the energy I want to bring to everything I do, at work, here at CSLB, everywhere.

And that's the love Rev. Michael was talking about. Which means there isn't a shortage, even though it sometimes feels that way.

The Five-Year-Old Problem

So why is love so hard to recognize or know, from that deep place of knowing?

Rev. Michael shared that in Don Miguel Ruiz's The Mastery of Love, so much of what we believe about whether we're lovable was wired in by the time we were five years old. Before we had language to question it, we were already learning the rules. Love has to be earned. Worthiness is conditional. Love is risky.

They're old programming running in present-day situations. And the lifelong work, the spiritual practice, is learning to see where those beliefs still make decisions for us. Most of us have some version of shame, fear of rejection, or the sense that we don't quite deserve it. Rev. Liz talked about that last week.

What Opening the Door Looks Like

Rev. Michael just returned from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, where he saw Come From Away, the musical based on what happened in Gander, Newfoundland on 9/11, when a small town took in thousands of stranded strangers and refused to let them be alone.

No one is a stranger here. Come near.

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.

He also quoted Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, "love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind," and described what it felt like to walk into a Science of Mind community for the first time. For some of us, it's overwhelming. Some feel like they've come home. At some point, we all feel a place of safety.

Sunday's music underscored all this, and Rev. Michael pointed out how our team shows up with love every single Sunday (whether they realize it or not). He called out this week's team, although there are more who regularly show up and give. But Sunday, Juniper, Owen, Kyle, Andrew, and Chris were all there for the debut of Trueman Beccia's new original, With or Without Your Hair Down. Could not love that more. It's a song about loving someone just the way they are. It was the right song for the right Sunday, and if you weren't there, you missed something good. (Watch here)

The Practice

What do we do with all this? Spiritual mind treatment, Rev. Michael said, is one of the most powerful tools in this philosophy, and his observation is that not enough of us use it to ask for help. So he asked us to complete a prayer request form right then.

He also talked about forgiveness — of ourselves and others — and gratitude. These are hard, and yet they're not. Rev. Michael said forgiveness may feel like a risk, but that vulnerability is where our deepest power is.

Love is both around you and within you, like Fred in water. You're not generating it from scratch; you're opening to what's already there. His powerful closing:

In this culture, the soul and heart often go homeless. Listening creates a holy silence — and when you listen generously, people can hear the truth in themselves, often for the first time. 

In the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone. Eventually you may hear, beyond everyone, the unseen: love itself, already knowing you.

Longing is real. But there's more to love, as Rev. Michael shared. So how do we find it? His answer, and Ernest Holmes' answer, and bell hooks' answer are all basically the same: you're already in it. You are it. It is us.

With gratitude,

Laura