How do you get to Heaven? It's very simple. Here's how. You must love the Creator more than anything in creation, including yourself. This is the only spiritual path that really counts, and the reason it does is because Heaven is a place of love but real love which is founded in love of God not one of the many lesser imitations we are familiar with in this world and which are mistaken for love, though they are but the shadows of it cast in the created world.
This love is why Jesus is important. It can be difficult to love God because most people simply aren't aware of him except for an idea or a theory. Now, you can love an idea in the sense of being passionate about it but that is not what we are talking about. Spiritual love you can only know when you feel it. Those who don't truly feel it might think they do until they really do. Then they realise that what they thought was love was just a human copy, wonderful in its own way but still a lesser thing.
Jesus is important because, as far as mankind is concerned, he is the face and form of God. It is therefore easier to love Jesus than to love God even though what you are loving in Jesus is actually God. But Jesus brings God down to earth for us and makes him comprehensible.
Love God. That is all it takes, and yet while this is simple it is also very hard for us because we are so distracted by this world, by the things in it and by ourselves. However, there are entry paths to this love which, while not being the proper love of God, help us to find him and therefore to love him. They are the love of truth, of beauty and of goodness. These are, as it were, the manifest forms of God, rather like Jesus, and for some people might be easier ways to begin to know God. They are necessary but not sufficient for you must go beyond even these eventually to know the God the Person who lies behind them as their living source.
Because many people want the gifts of God without really loving him there are many spiritual paths which have been invented to make up for this lack of love. The way of knowledge is one. It is good but not good enough. Meditation. Again, good but not enough on its own. Esoteric techniques of various kinds. Yoga, Tantra and the like. These may bestow higher states of consciousness and even powers, but they will not get you to Heaven without love. With these things but without love you will just become a magician, and what use is that to the soul that wants to know God? You can be a spiritual superman roaming the higher planes and experiencing what seems to be cosmic consciousness, but if you do not have a true and sincere love of God then you are always going to be outside his Kingdom because only love can transfigure the soul and make it pure enough get to Heaven.
2 comments:
Sure, but the obverse of love of God is hating and not loving "the world" (fame, money, success, comfort, attachment to material things).
And nobody today wants to do that today. I have seen Christians twist themselves into pretzels rather than admit that the spiritual life means you have to give up those big comfortable houses, that successful career, all that money - those things are incompatible with loving God.
As one of the Desert Fathers said "who ever heard of living a spiritual life on a full belly?"
But nobody wants to admit that today. You will find today that the most eloquent and lyrical and passionate writer on religion, Christian or not, invariably lives a comfortable bourgeois life, with security, takes no risks and does nothing bold or radical.
I suspect the truly religious today are more likely to be found among, for instance, people who give up comfortable lives to live in their vans or cars in the American West, or who devote their lives to thru hiking for months. And they don't even call themselves religious, but listening to them one hears the unmistakeable echo of love for God.
You're not wrong. Twist themselves into pretzels is a great phrase!
Post a Comment