Spiritual Life is Like Falling in Love

Spiritual Life is Like Falling in Love March 21, 2015

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It is challenging to plan falling in love.

Love, like any relationship, does not follow measurable steps toward a clear outcome. Our efforts to organize, analyze, and control falling in love rarely turn out the way we hope. Love does not follow the rules. Love is more poetry and music than prose.

We may try to plan falling in love ourselves, or getting someone else to fall in love with us. It is difficult to measure and assess love. Love tends to hide where we cannot see it in its fullness. We wander along, seeing what we can see, until love overwhelms us in its hidden depths.

We cannot think our way into love, nor buy it, nor force ourselves to have feelings of love. We do not like to admit that love is so much stronger than anything we can control or plan.

Love is essential to spiritual life. Like love, spiritual life is deeper than anything we can control. We cannot do anything to earn enough points to win spiritual life, nor can we have it taken from us. Spiritual life is about being open to the sacred truth all around us, and within us.

Ironically, we become anxious about whether we will ever find the love we desire.

We often look at spiritual life as a way to acquire more of what we want.

In reality, we seek spiritual life by letting go of the things we hold onto that get in our way. The spiritual practices we try to strengthen in ourselves are ways to learn to let go. Like with love, we practice setting aside what distracts us from spiritual life.

When is spiritual life like falling in love for you?

How will you fall into spiritual life today?

[Image by Josep Ma. Rosell]


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