A great healing has taken place and I can only describe it.

It used to be that, if I felt happy, one side of me would get nervous: Dad would swat me if I got too happy.

So there were two sides of me: the happy side and the nervous-at-being-happy side.

Nowadays the wounded child in me is happy being happy and the other side of me is just plain happy anyways.

So, when I feel happy, I feel genuinely, wholly, and indisputably happy.

I’m not a house divided against itself any longer. Given that till age 58 I was, (1) all discoveries in this area are like gladly-recovered ground on the road to wholeness.

***

Now I’ve transitioned from happiness to transformative love. Thoughts of the beloved brought it on.

I keep thinking of new metaphors to describe this kind of love.

I compare ordinary love, no matter how refined, to my 1959 radio, which was primitive by our standards.

Now think of the first time you went into a home that had a $2500 home audio set, including a radio that blew you away for fidelity. I compare that to transformative love.

Or take your $150 TV and compare it to the latest 4G television that makes a jewel appear lustrous. I was moved watching a 4K TV for the first time last weekend. The gulf between the two is similar to the gulf between regular and transformative love.

***

But as to describing love itself? I can’t find words to do it justice. I wouldn’t even try.

I look and look and look; I feel and feel and feel; and I cannot come up with a single word to describe this kind of love in and of itself.

And yet I can say that my experience of it is delightful. My experience of it is as of something that satisfies every sense, every longing, every desire I’ve ever had. No wonder Saul calls it the answer to every problem. It fulfills every desire.

Love leaves no one out and I wouldn’t want to leave anyone out from the experience of it. The world will work for everyone when we all experience this kind of love.

One taste of it and one would know instantly what I’m talking about. Without a taste of it, it can sound as if I’m talking in mysteries and riddles.

Love itself is universal. It can be no other way. How would it be love if it excluded someone?

Everyone of this religion is loved and should come over here and everyone of that religion is not loved and can go to hell: How is that love?

To say “make your love be universal” is a contradiction in terms. Love is already universal. If I’m partial, loving some and hating others, transformative love won’t visit me. It’s I that needs to be universal, not love.

Footnotes

(1) I was dissociated till age 58, at which time, in a blazing heat, I fused back together again, thanks to my brother’s skillful therapeutic work with me.

Before then, I was never confident of the ground beneath my feet. I was always projecting a need for … love, I think. I was not whole. I was fragmented, uncertain.