Kierkegaard's Deep Hidden Spring of Love

Love’s hidden life is in the innermost being, unfathomable, and then in turn is in an unfathomable connectedness with all existence. Just as the quiet lake originates deep down in hidden springs no eye has seen, so also does a person’s love originate even more deeply in God’s love. If there were no gushing spring at the bottom, if God were not love, then there would be neither the little lake nor a human being’s love. Just as the quiet lake originates darkly in the deep spring, so a human being’s love originates mysteriously in God’s love.
Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. pp 9, 10.

Traherne's True Love

True Love as it intendeth the greatest gifts intendeth also the greatest benefits. It contenteth not itself in showing great things unless it can make them greatly useful. For Love greatly delighteth in seeing its object continually seated in the highest happiness. Unless therefore I could advance you higher by the uses of what I give, my Love could not be satisfied in giving you the whole world. But because when you enjoy it you are advanced to the Throne of God and may see His Love; I rest well pleased in bestowing it. It will make you to see your own greatness, the truth of the Scriptures, the amiableness of Virtue, and the beauty of Religion. It will enable you to contemn the world, and to overflow with praises.

Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, Book I, Number 6.

Anyone Can Love Anyone

Addendum to True Statements About Love:
Anyone can love anyone.
(Don't ask me how I know. Just live with it a while and you will know.)

True Statements About Love

Some statements about love which I think are true:

(Not necessarily in order of importance)

• Love is not a feeling, but love has feelings.
  • A person who loves often feels the feelings of the person he or she loves, although they might not be recognizable as such.
• You cannot love if you reject the love of others.
  • You cannot love yourself or others if you reject the love of others or yourself.
• You cannot love other people if you do not love God.
  • You cannot love God if you don’t think He loves you.
  • You cannot love others if God doesn’t love you.
• Love says, it’s good that you exist.
  • Love says, it’s good that I exist.
• Love comes from God.
• God is love.
• God loves you.
• A person who loves should believe there is love in the heart of the loved one.
• We cannot live without love.
  • We want and need to be loved.
  • We want to be loved, in particular, by the people we love.
• We cannot make anyone (or everyone) love us.
• Love is a commandment of God.
• When someone loves us we tend to feel ashamed.
  • When we are ashamed we often do things that don’t look like love.
• Love is often hidden under other things like self-righteousness and fear. When we clear away those things the love remains and appears.
• Love moves toward people. [Paul Miller]
  • Love doesn’t leave people alone. [Miller]

Here is something else I have been thinking about that is worth exploring:

Love is like light. As per theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, it has properties of a wave and a particle.

Love Follows Knowledge

Dallas Willard quotes Thomas Aquinas in The Divine Conspiracy.

"Love is born of an earnest consideration of the object loved." And: "Love follows knowledge." Love is an emotional response aroused in the will by visions of the good.

Now Willard goes on to relate the principle to the process of our learning to love God. We learn about the Person of God. And with that knowledge we get a vision of all the good He is, and so we love Him. But in my view it also applies to knowing and loving people.
I remember when I used to go to Theotherapy Seminars, after a person in need had worked through some knotty personal problem expressing all the good and the bad in themselves, everyone present always felt love for them. You might think people would be turned off by the expression of all kinds of personal and relational dirty laundry but no. And the reason is that after the revelations we knew the person a little better and could empathize and feel love and compassion.
I often say to people who are worried about the possibility of their being rejected by another person, "When they know you better they will love you more."
If we hide behind facades others will not know to love us and if we do not seek out others, allowing them to share their lives with us, we will not have any real grounds for really loving them as they are.

Unspeakably Magnificent Personal Beings

For the last couple weeks I've been walking around grieving, afflicted - afraid of losing the little bit that I think I have. Thrashing around, losing grip and sliding down the rope that I think I have to hang on to. Fighting for every inch of my ground of faith - seemingly gaining and losing the same patch of ground over and over again every day. I'm tired and weary, worn to a frazzle. Giving up and not giving up all at the same time again and again.
Tonight I was reading my daily bit from Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy:

...The advantage of believing in the Trinity is that we then live as if the Trinity is real: as if the cosmos environing us actually is, beyond all else, a self-sufficing community of unspeakably magnificent personal beings of boundless love, knowledge, and power. And thus believing, our lives naturally integrate themselves, through our actions, into the reality of such a universe, just as with two plus two equals four. In faith we rest ourselves upon the reality of the Trinity in action—and it graciously meets us. For it is there. And our lives are then enmeshed in the true world of God.

And it jumped out at me and said, here it is. God is all around me, filling my world with love. His love is streaming both ways in every relationship I am involved in. Giants of responsibility and respect greet me at every turn.
I say to myself, You already believe it, now bank on it.
I've been preaching it myself. Saying to everyone around me, "believe you are loved," and yet it keeps flying away from me, like it were the last thing on my mind. So why do we keep doubting the very voice that saves us? Doesn't make sense.