The Recovery of Love

These books are the second and third in a trilogy on the narrative of love, a collaboration with Scherto R. Gill of the Guerrand-Hermes Foundation for Peace, whose book I will review in the next issue. I reviewed the first book, Love and the Divine Feminine, in a previous issue. David is a birthright Quaker, who lives near the sea in Suffolk, experiencing in his being the movement of the tides and the procession of the seasons as expressions of the dynamics of life. In a sentence, the message of these books is that love is of the essence, and that we must take it much more seriously than we do as a competitive society devoted to the pursuit of wealth and power to the detriment of other people and Nature.

The source of these books is a powerful experience reported in the second volume, where Love came to David as he sat quietly in his study on an autumn day. She invited him to suppose for a while that what she said was true: ‘to find Truth, find me – be in love, Be in Love. To rest and be at peace, dwell in me – be in love, Be in Love.’ (p. 14) This entails aligning to goodness and beauty, uniting the true and the good, whereby ‘to enquire of Love is to enquire into the very nature of Being.’ On this planet, the rising and falling of Being is ‘a constant rhythm of union, separation and reunion… held in balance and harmony by Love.’ In this disconnected world, ‘separated and apart you find no place for me.’ As one of the speakers at the recent Mystics and Scientists conference remarked, even in the medical system there is little room for compassion. The challenge of taking love seriously – which Peter Deunov and Gandhi did by recognising love as a cosmological force – is to re-imagine and reconfigure our world in a governance of love rather than of militarism, violence and power over. David asks what is needed if Love is to flourish, to be nurtured and expressed? This Love is ‘the Ultimate Presence, the consciousness of Nature, the Universe and the Cosmos. In this way, we might say that Love is that which fosters right relationship.’ (p. 21) Such Love has been directly experienced by mystics the world over.

The first book examines the language and meaning of love and its relationship to silence, then the Divine Feminine, the wrong turning we have made (nicely expressed in a story), partnerships and relational being, the principles of harmony, the Tao as Love, and the economy of love. Love is elemental, it is the ground of kindness, reciprocity, generosity, peace and our capacity to relate. ‘Love is the foundation of the True and the Good, the essence of True Being.’ (p. 175) We each need to ask ourselves how we are going to be, taking time to slow down, to dwell in love and silence, to attend and wait on the divine. I had not previously come across the work of Kenneth Gergen on relational being, whereby ‘the self is constituted by a confluence of performative relationships.’ (p. 121) He argues that ‘we need to recast the discourse of the mind in such a way that human connection replaces separation as the fundamental reality.’ (p. 123)

In discussing the principles of harmony, David refers to the work of the King, whose collected speeches he edited in two volumes; also to Riane Eisler’s partnership societies, Joseph Milne’s work on metaphysics and the cosmic order, and especially to the challenges in this respect posed by the legacy of patriarchy and our narrow focus on technology; then in the separate chapter, he elaborates on the eternal message of the Tao as an expression of the Divine Feminine. The chapter on the economy of love is a bold and entirely valid thought experiment in bringing different principles and values to bear while fundamentally questioning currently economic assumptions. What if we could come from ‘a place of integration, relationship and a caring for each other, for community and for Nature herself?’ (p. 177) None of this is impossible in principle with a sufficiently compelling vision and corresponding political will expressed in firmness of resolve. We already know that ordinary people share basic values of helpfulness and friendship, but they see national life as permeated by bureaucracy, violence and corruption.

In Order to Love is focused on the birth and life of our universe, the relationship between mother and child, and some final reflections on the requirements of Great Love. The first chapter focuses on the work of Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme and Jude Currivan. I was particularly inspired by this quotation from Teilhard expressing his evolutionary law of Attraction-Connection–Complexity-Consciousness: ‘Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and most mysterious of the cosmic forces… divine love is the energy that brought the universe into being and binds it together. Human love is whatever energy we use to help divine love achieve its purpose.’ (p. 36) I think we can take heart if we understand that there is a cosmic evolutionary drive towards a culture of love and freedom (see review of The Upshift below), in spite of the current rise of authoritarianism, which is not consistent with the development of higher states of consciousness.

The chapter on mother and child is informed by the latest research, supplemented by an informative neurochemical review of the early development of love as attachment. Developing and applying a narrative of love is surely one of the most essential undertakings for our time, and to which the Fetzer Institute is also devoted. How can we come into right relationship with the whole by fundamentally altering our prevalent principles, values and systems? I highly recommend that you make time to read David’s simple and profound reflections as the fruit of a lifetime’s devotion to beauty, truth, contemplation and wisdom – then set your intent to play an active role in co-creating what Charles Eisenstein called the beautiful world we know in our hearts is possible. We can at least begin by doing this in our circle of influence in spite of the ceaseless barrage of fear inducing news stories.