Love Is The Purification
What if love is not something a person earns after becoming whole, but the very presence that makes wholeness possible? Love Is the Purification is a reflection on shame, hidden wounds, and the radical invitation to come exactly as one is. Nothing must be perfected before it is brought into love.
The great undoing of the spiritual life is not a person becoming worthy of love. It is the discovery that worthiness was never the condition.
“Come as you are” can sound almost casual until someone begins to understand how radical it truly is.
A person is invited to come with the grief, the fear, the shame, the vanity, the compulsions, the loneliness, the unfinished healing, and the whole complicated history of a human life.
Nothing has to be made perfect before it can be brought into love.
Love is not waiting at the end as a reward for finally getting everything right. Love is present at the beginning. It is present in the pain and suffering, in the confusion, in the struggle, and in the life that still feels unresolved.
Perhaps the darkest places within a person are simply the places where they became convinced they had to hide.
They may have hidden their fear, their need, their grief, their tenderness, or the parts of themselves they believed would be judged or rejected. Over time, those hidden places can begin to feel separate from the rest of life, separate from other people, and even separate from God.
Healing is the slow reversal of that movement.
It is the gentle return of what was hidden.
It is taking each wounded part by the hand and saying:
You too. You may come.
Love does not ask a suffering person to lay everything down in a courtroom. God does not receive them as a judge waiting to hear how badly they have failed.
They are invited to lay it down among the lotus petals.
Lay down the grief.
Lay down the fear.
Lay down the ancient shame.
Lay down the stories carried for so long that they began to feel like identity.
Let even the oldest wound be received gently. Let what once seemed permanent begin to loosen its hold. Let what has burdened the heart be swept away into the dust of antiquity.
A person does not have to become whole before love can enter.
Love is already there.
Love is the purification.
Nigel Lott teaandzen.org
Meditation Sans Frontieres 501 (C) 3 Registered Charity Tax EIN 81-3411835
May the work offered here serve peace, serve healing, serve remembrance, and serve the quiet dignity of being alive. May this sanctuary belong not to one person alone, but to the field of life itself.
And may all who encounter it feel, even for a moment, that nothing is missing and they are not alone.