As I reflected on all the responses to the Coronavirus and the Active Peace perspective, I came up with these thoughts on how trusting in love can help us face our fears—now and always.

Do you trust that despite the chaos and fear so prevalent right now that love will prevail? Not that there’s a predetermined outcome, that species extinction and conflict and injustice won’t continue, but that there’s a guiding principle in play, and to the extent that you align with that principle, you can trust, even relax and be joyful.

Love as Guiding Principle

Understanding love is one of the last frontiers. Not love as a sentimental emotion, but love as the basic quality of human beings, love as the creative force. 

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s famous dictum has stood the test of time: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

The simplicity and directness of that message has always felt like a transmission of truth to me, but what does it really mean? Does it point to what we are beyond the personality and the body? Does it imply that what we most truly are is nonmaterial, unborn, and undying? Does it remind us that we are connected to the very source of life and that our being is imbued with qualities such as clarity, wholeness, and love? Isn’t this a comfort and a good guiding principle for our lives?

The spiritual teacher Adyashanti reframes the Bible’s “For God so loved the world” in this way: “I (as a spiritual being) so loved the world that I poured myself into it.” Ponder that for awhile!

Some quantum physicists also refer to love as they explore the deepest mysteries of existence. They use words such as allurement, entanglement, and strange attractors, but as the cosmologist Brian Swimme makes clear, love itself may be the best descriptor:

The primary result of all allurement is the evocation of being.… Love is a word that points to this alluring activity in the cosmos. This primal dynamism awakens the communities of atoms, galaxies, stars, families, nations, persons, ecosystems, oceans, and stellar systems. Love ignites being.

The universe and everything of it—all of evolution and our every move too—can now be seen as a singular, continuous unfolding rooted in love, in attraction and allurement. 

So it’s not so much about trusting that love will prevail, but trusting that love is already having its way—regardless of appearances and our preferences.

Love, Nonviolence, and Transformational Activism

A focus on love doesn’t imply a transcendent view of life that ignores the darkness. It just means that there is a guiding principle that is slowly rebalancing our world. When activists align their action with love, how much more effective and transformational will they be?

Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jesus continue to be inspirations because of the extent to which they were aligned with love. Gandhi was clear that our basic nature is nonviolent and he often equated nonviolence and love. Martin Luther King Jr. was equally clear that love, manifested in his vision of the Beloved Community, was the end goal of nonviolence. Jesus himself may be our most stunning example of love in action. We too, if we weren’t fractured in our consciousness by the belief in separateness would act with that same level of clarity and courage.

This all led me, a few years back, to articulate the two core principles of nonviolence as:

1. Uphold the basic integrity of yourself and others at all times—no exceptions, and 
2. Lead with love. 

This paradigm busting mindset is foundational for transformational activism. 

Taking the Long View

Seen from a systems change perspective, our social systems are unstable and chaotic and have been for a long time. The center cannot hold, the basic assumptions and values have always been unsustainable and the chaos and attempts to consolidate power are the last gasps of a dying old paradigm.

We know from our own lives that as we get closer to changing old patterns in significant ways, the old habits become stronger until there is a breakthrough or we give up. But there is movement even in the giving up—it just isn’t linear and under our conscious control. There is a guiding principle in play!

None of this means that we can rest on our laurels. We’re still called to contribute to a more just, sane world. Our responses to the current pandemic can help shape who we are for the rest of our lives. Fear is indeed our greatest teacher! And when we embody the understanding that love is the guiding principle it helps us take the time for self-care, for relationships, for more consciously deepening into our rootedness in the Earth. We can be more grateful than ever for life and the beauty of the world.

May you use this very moment to face your fears and burn all illusions!

Photo credit: Jeremy Thomas, via Unsplash