Is Divine Love the Answer or a Question?
By: Patrick Paul Garlinger
Tags: Social Change, Spiritual Secrets, Spiritual Love, Energy, Spirituality

Is Divine Love the Answer or a Question?

We must meet the world’s hatred with love, but what does that look like?

Photo by Simone Secci on Unsplash

It’s something of a platitude, especially in spiritual circles, to say that “love is the answer.” It’s as if all of the questions we might have about the world we live in could simply be answered by that single word.

Indeed, there is so much power in that word that it’s not hard to see why for every conflict or conundrum we face, we might utter, as if an incantation or magic spell, love is the answer.

Even though I’ve often joined the chorus of voices extolling love, I’ve never found that phrase entirely satisfactory. Why? you ask. Do you question love’s power? No, I don’t. But to say that “love is the answer” has, on its own, never taught me what it might mean to love that which seems unlovable.

Embodying Unconditional Love

When I have felt the grace of Divine love, it was unconditional. The first time I felt the Light pour into me, all I could think was, “God exists.” Countless times since that moment in 2010, I have had so many experiences with the Light of the Divine. Each time, no part of me felt like it needed to change to be worthy of that gift of Divine love. Whatever I had said, whatever I had done was not a barrier to being loved. But it also did not relieve me of my obligation to face the consequences of my actions. If I had said something harmful, I still had to resolve the karma I had generated.

So when I hear “love is the answer,” I ask myself: Can I meet the perpetrators of such harm with the unconditional love that the Divine has graced me with? What does such unconditional love still demand of them?

It seems fairly easy that conflicts with one’s spouse or partner or family members or friends might be resolved with love, but even there, questions of abuse or trauma might give us pause as to what it means to love the family members who hurt us.

When they seem impervious to changing their behavior, unconditional love (for them and ourselves) might require that we separate from them, loving them from afar so that the barbs of their tongue or the blows of their fists aren’t within reach. It might mean loving ourselves so that we exit a relationship when our needs are voiced and rejected or met with even more abuse.

Embodying this kind of unconditional love also might mean loving the entire experience because it taught us something important about ourselves and our relationships. Perhaps we learned boundaries and the need for self-love; perhaps we learned compassion and the capacity to repair our connections. Whatever the conflict is, however painful the relationship, we can step back and appreciate the wisdom it was imparting to us.

Loving What Seems Unlovable

How, then, are we meant to apply love to the kinds of scenarios we face where we have no direct relationship with the participants? Indulge, if you will, some recent scenarios:

What does it look like for love to be the answer to the children separated from their parents at the border?

What does it look like for love to be the answer to a policeman’s knee pressed on the back of a Black man’s neck until he dies?

What does it look like for love to be the answer to the death of a trans woman or the stripping away of her workplace protections?

What doe sit look like for love to be the answer to the corrupt machinations of politicians in search of power and money?

What does it look like for love to be the answer to the melting ice caps and the starving polar bears or the landscape ravaged by wildfires?

Your first answer might be to say that immigrant children need love, George Floyd, his family, and all Black lives deserve love, trans people deserve love, and the earth deserves love. I would agree with you wholeheartedly.

But how do we bring love to the situation? How do we bring love to the perpetrators? Do the ICE and border patrol agents deserve love? Do the police officers deserve love? Do politicians and administration officials deserve love? Do CEOs of polluting companies deserve love? Do murderers deserve love? You might say that they don’t deserve love, only punishment, but that would be inconsistent with the unconditional love of the Divine.

If your answer is yes, with which I would agree, that simply begs another series of questions: What form does love take as the answer? What does loving ICE or CEOs or politicians or racist police officers look like? What kind of action does love take in the face of that pain?

For it certainly cannot be the case that I simply send “love and light” as a kind pat formula for all the hatred I encounter in the world. Love’s answer is not simply to send “love and light” as the New Age counterpoint to “thoughts and prayers.” Of course, there’s nothing wrong with saying a prayer for someone. In fact, it’s a beautiful and powerful gesture to sincerely ask for the Divine to assist someone else’s life.

But that’s not the only form that love can take. Love might say it means I call my elected officials, that I vote for a new President whose policies won’t diminish Black lives in the name of law and order or won’t advocate for separating children and losing their parents to instill so much fear in those at the Mexican border hoping desperately to find a place to live in peace that they turn around and flee. It might mean I march. It might mean I speak out. It might mean I work as an attorney on a pro bono matter or join a nonprofit to volunteer my time.

Love, then, becomes a question with countless answers.

Letting Go of Judgment, Opening to Possibility

I feel it is important to state that unconditional love does not necessarily mean we don’t hold people accountable for their actions. Loving others does not mean that they do not have to face their karma. You can’t take that on for someone else, nor does unconditional love simply mean turning the page as if it never happened. Those individuals must be checked by preventing them from manipulating levers of power to inflict their pain on others. They should not have access to systems that allow them to cause widespread harm. Some of them might even face imprisonment for their actions.

Rather, it means that, as individuals, as we generate our thoughts and opinions in response to these events, we look for the wound that drives people to behave in such harmful ways. Why do people like Donald Trump, David Chauvin, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, to name just a few, not see the lives of those they’ve harmed as equally valuable? What personal pain and self-interest are motivating their worldviews?

Divine love says that we know that these actions should not be met with judgment, viewing them as “bad” people whose lives have no value because they’ve treated others’ lives as worthless. That simply compounds the problem. That’s meeting hate with hate. Again, that doesn’t mean they don’t suffer the karmic consequences, including legal accountability. But wishing them to suffer will hardly cure their wounded parts, their shadow sides that gave rise to their harmful behavior. And it is only in healing those wounds, as a collective, that we are going to break the cyclical patterns where the same kinds of beliefs are passed from one generation to the next.

So what does divine love’s answer look like? Judgment wants to throw them out or lock them away. You may secretly wish for them to suffer for all the suffering they imparted. You don’t have to do that; the energy you put out will eventually return to you, and so you do not need to do karma’s work.

Discernment, on the other hand, recognizes that they are acting from a deeply wounded place. When we regard a situation with discernment, we remember that the wounds driving people to inflict pain on others come from the fact that love was withheld from them at some point in their lives: their mothers or fathers did not or could not love them in a way that made them feel safe and whole, and that wound has never healed.

That is why we cannot meet them with the kind of judgment that caused their wound in the first place. It does nothing to heal them; it only poisons them and ourselves. Instead, as hard as it might seem, we have to ask: How can I love you — as a being of spirit, as a child of God — even when you’ve acted out of hate?

That question is an invitation to call forth a consciousness that perceives the world with the eyes of divine love and the wisdom of karma. It means you recognize that they have forgotten (or never learned) that they are divine beings, and so is everyone else. Once you ask to meet the world’s hatred with divine love, you ask yourself: How would divine love respond to this particular situation?

That question is a portal to an infinite number of possibilities. But it is perhaps less important that we have the answers then that we simply ask the question in the first place.