Ring the Bell

God said:

Life, as you know it, is not reasonable, nor are you, beloveds.

Too often you hide from life. You run away from it in myriad ways. You disguise life from yourself. You enter into a hurdy-gurdy of activity and absent yourself from life. You go to great lengths to avoid life. You try to escape it. Neither the roller-coaster nor the slide is life. Activity is not life. Pretense is not life. Avoidance of life is not life.

Roll up your sleeves and enter life. Do not tip-toe around it. Do not hem and haw or cover your face. Go to the well, and drink. Go to the market-place and display your wares. Let today be the meeting place of hearts. Let your heart be the Maypole.

No longer distance yourself from life with frantic activity nor with skirting around it. Do not absent yourself from life.

This is your life We are talking about. Live it then. Enter into the center of it. The center of life is love. Too often you have separated yourself from love. You have even denounced it. You have settled for attachment instead.

The lessening of attachment is not detachment. Has not much of your life been spent in attaching or detaching? Pulling and pushing are not what your life is to be employed with.

Love has often meant holding or withholding, tightening or perhaps tossing away or tossing aside. Neither attach nor dis-entach. Free instead. Free love. Give it away. You cannot set limits on love. You cannot restrict it, for then it is no longer love. Love is not control. Nor can you walk away from love, leaving it in the dust behind you.

Do not make a false front of your heart. You have pretended that your heart is a flower garden, and you have pretended that your heart is a wasteland. You have built fences around your heart, thinking you protect it. What would you be protecting it from but life?

First of all, you cannot protect yourself from life. You cannot hide in the corner from it. You cannot hide in the crowds. Protecting your heart is a backward motion. It is a withdrawal from life.

A great secret to life is to be honest in it. Above all, let your heart be honest. And you be honest with your heart. Do not dance around yourself, sparring with yourself as it were, pretending you are cool, complacent, or pretending you are hot and angry. Even anger is a cover-up, beloveds. It is waging war on your heart. It is beating your heart into submission.

You may think anger is letting it out, but anger is also keeping it in. You would have anger rather than court love. It must be that you have chosen anger over love. You say you would love if it were not for thus and so, and so you barricade your heart with a summation of negativity you call anger. Anger is your right, you say. Beloveds, love is your right.

Absence of anger is not love either. Only love is love. Love engages. It does not separate. Whatever is going on in the outer world, free your heart. Free it from anger. Free it from isolation. Your heart is not a wild animal to be caged. Restrict not your love. Issue your love the way you do anger.

You are to give service to life. You are to give service to yourself, not disservice.

Come now, come out of your cloister and come out of the boxing ring. Ring the bell of life now.