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The Heart Opens to the Light
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Note: Here, I write of Pure Love. I learned of this as a child in the local, rural Baptist Church. I did not hear it called Pure Love but learned this reference after entering practice of Contemplative Christianity. To us in our Baptist community, God expressed and was this Love. I am not sure anyone believed, however, we could consistently express it or that we were it. Still, learning of it is one of the gifts my religious upbringing provided me. For that, I am grateful. Likewise, my first spiritual opening, at age 9, was an immersion in this Pure Love. Now, no longer a part of the Church, I hold dearly the same Love and Beloved I experienced in it. I pray to more and more become it. I pray daily for all to more and more become it. May it be so!
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*Guru Nanak. Poems from the Sikh Sacred Tradition. Trans. Nikki-Gunideer Kaur Singh.
... they steep in love ...
*Jiddu Krishnamurti. The Book of Life. Ed. R. E. Mark Lee.
Love is a flame ... creative, ever fresh, joyous. Such love is dangerous to society, to relationship. So, thought steps in, modifies, guides it, legalizes it, puts it out of danger; then one can live with it.
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Pure Love - Love arising freely, spontaneously from Presence before person, or self, and manifesting in and through person, or self. Being a means of Pure Love is not only a grace available to the human species; other beings of Nature share love in ways based on their capabilities. We have no idea the extent of love surrounding us always. If we knew, we might not be able to withstand it physically.
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Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism, ends a verse "Nanak pleads" ... a verse in which we find the words above: "they steep in love." He knew, as we do, that any life and any spirituality without this steeping are severely inhibited. The most important is missing. One may live a decent life, even a good life, and miss this greater life due to not immersing in the love of which the great spiritual paths speak.
I drink hot tea daily. I steep the leaves in hot water. The water and tea merge, the water taking on the taste of the leaves, which surrender their flavor to the water. Likewise with us, and our steeping in Presence, which is Love.
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The late Toni Packer, in her book The Wonder of Presence, recounts the following experience while visiting her parents in Switzerland ...
I had always had a difficult relationship with my mother. I had been afraid of her. She was a very passionate woman with lots of anger, but also love. Once during that visit I saw her standing in the dining room facing me. She was just standing there, and for no known reason I suddenly saw her without the past. There was no image of her, and also no idea of what she saw in me. All that was gone. There was nothing left except pure love for this woman. Such beauty shone out of her. And our relationship changed; there was a new closeness. No one changed it. It just happened.
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The above story reminded me of a similar experience with a man I will call Joe. I was a pastor for Joe, a progressive, intellectual, inclusive pastor. I was barely hanging on to my Christian confession and, at the same time, serving an evangelical, conservative congregation in the deep South.
Joe was a fundamentalist, living in a little town in central Florida. Joe and I, see, were somewhat opposites. I was not close to him. He had aligned with an opposing group in the congregation of like-minded ones. These felt the need to defend their church and their "God." They especially opposed me for my believing in welcoming homosexuals into the church and appreciation of other religions.
I was, likewise, a friend of a dear woman I will call Margaret. She and I had similar spiritual ideas and values. She was much older, having a few years prior lost her husband to death. She and I spent a lot of time together, and she provided much spiritual support during the time the group Joe aligned with connived to have me ousted from both the church and ministry in the United Methodist Church.
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Joe took it upon himself to do something weird and unexpected, even outlandish, one Sunday morning. A group of parishioners and I were in a room to the side of the altar and choir area. Each Sunday, we would join in prayer there before the start of the worship meeting. We were praying, holding hands. We heard yelling, angry yelling. Faces showed perplexity. Someone was doing what we called, in my childhood, 'ranting and raving'. Soon, we were clear Joe was the culprit.
Joe had stood in the pulpit, behind the lectern, and began a tirade against the congregation for supporting this heretical pastor - heretical in his estimation. Joe, likewise, had shouted some unkind things to say about Margaret. Joe did this before everyone, including visitors. I guess they were shocked at the show they never signed up for that Sunday.
Joe left the building with his head down. He returned during the worship meeting, to my surprise, and sat quietly.
Right after Joe's diatribe, I was walking among the congregation. I heard a visitor say to his wife, "Come on, let's go, we don't have to put up with this!" They left. I would have left, too.
I led worship meeting that day with an unruffled demeanor, as I did each Sunday. The best I could do, I decided, was remain calm and act as though all was as usual. The entire congregation moved through the worship meeting in the same casual manner. Possibly, as a close-knit rural community, knowing Joe well, they were not as surprised as I was by what he did.
Several years later, I was in meditation. I received a big surprise. Out of nowhere, a spontaneous feeling of joyful love for Joe arose. I could not even recall when Joe had last been on my mind. I embraced this arising as a grace not coming from Brian. This was one of my first lessons in Pure Love - a post-conventional, post-personal experience.
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See -
Only Pure Love
teaches Pure Love
And no one can tell another
what it is
The wind is the wind
told or untold... you can feel it
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When we are living from the personality, the ego, we seek to be creators of love, doers of love. We aspire to be loving. We work at loving. We put forth effortfulness to prove we love others.
From the True Self, or "I," the personality is no longer carrying around an agenda to love. We are no longer seeking to prove we love anyone. Love loves, that simple, and as much in our not-doing as our doing, in our not-speaking as our speaking. Persons attached to love as an act of ego will not understand this, yet they can receive it and may notice something different happening than the usual. They will likely conclude you are simply a loving person, but you know better. You know you are not only a loving person; you are a means of a love no person can be the source of.
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Effortfulness to love dissolves in Grace by Grace. We are moving in an environment where loving arises effortlessly and spontaneously. We become more loving by releasing the personal right to love anyone or anything. We, as persons, become the environment in which Love expresses itself. As non-ego, we are both the creators and participants in this subtle, intangible environment.
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Love has an amazing capacity
to appear, no known explanation,
to surprise us.
And for Pure Love to see the other through us,
means to see the Other in the other,
to see in the moment afresh, timelessly.
The more we abdicate a claim to be able to love,
the more potential there is for Love to love.
There are loves, but only
one Pure Love, only
one Presence that is the Beloved and
sees through others' appearances.
We become, by Grace,
Lover and love.
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Love freely expresses. Love surprises us. No one can say what it is, but it is available to everyone, whether asked for or not. Immersing ourselves in the Beloved, we become what the Beloved is.
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(C) brian wilcox, 2026
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