Love and the Divine (2)

I was talking about a sense of "unconditional love" yesterday. In thinking about how I or others might experience this, I must confront the nature of the religious experience, and other similar experience in my life.

I have always set great store by the rational as the only chance we have of any quantifiable assessment of anything. Accordingly, like my father, I have been attracted to belief systems like Spiritualism, precisely because they offered something observable, where others simply offered theoretical constructs which, if you had no "Road To Damascus" episode of your own by way of coroboration, would either ring true or not.
Until the recent resurgence of my own interest in this area, I had put my general God experiences on the back burner, and I would talk of having no religious faith, while rather envying the certainties of those who do, not because they were necessarily true, but because of how good it must feel to be certain about something.
However, thinking about it, it's clear that I do have some certainties of my own, although they are a very long way from the user's manual which some brandish in the face of those who don't share their certainties. My point being?
My point being that these "certainties" of mine are not coming to me via my old friend rationality; they are coming to me via the mysterious input of spirit/emotion, depending on your viewpoint. I now have to face the fact that I am probably more certain of these convictions than I am of my rational conclusions and opinions. These latter are, and I think should be, fairly plastic, depending as they do on my own ability to substantiate them. To me, an opinion is only as good as my ability to justify it. In the rational realm, if I don't know why I believe something to be true, then there's nothing to discuss. So, personally, my opinions are, or should be, subject to change based on the daily accretion of experience and information.
But that Divine stuff is a whole other thing. I know it's true for me simply because it is, I feel it to be so. Many have gone to their death for the sake of a conviction which they could never prove by logical argument. So I have to face the fact that my faith, vague generalised thing that it is, is a new kind of certainty for me. In fact, it's the only kind of certainty for me because the rational world is subject to continuous revision. Tomorrow, some physicist might prove that everything we have believed about mass and energy is plain wrong, or at best a massive over-simplification. But that would do nothing to change my recollection of the real presence of limitless love which hit me in the chest while walking in the Malvern Hills, or during a school church service.

Coming back, eventually, to unconditional love, I find myself viewing it differently when thinking about it via what passes for my rationality, as opposed to feeling it.

In rational mode, unconditional love may make me start worrying about my unworthiness of it; or I might start thinking of the dangers of people believing they are loved as of right, making any conduct acceptable.
But unconditional love as I experience it is a thing of pure joy, which comes with no such worries attached. It simply exists, both as the Divine, and as an echo of that divinity for those of us who are lucky enough to find flashes of it in our lives through our human interactions, both as giver and receiver.

If that's a dichotomy, I just have to live with it, because the world is a place in which, improbable as it sounds, love exists, I am loved, and I am capable of expressing love, however imperfectly. On the occasions when I can do that, I feel most in tune with those numinous episodes; most aware that, whatever the ultimate truth is, it couldn't be better. In the face of that, the rational will simply have to learn to sit at the back and keep quiet occasionally.


Reg