Love is the contemplative recognition that what underlies the universe is itself a movement of love. The recognition is not cold, not detached, not the witness as bystander. It is intimate, devotional, and active.
Bernard of Clairvaux preached eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs, working the whole nuptial vocabulary of the Hebrew text into a contemplative theology of the soul as bride and Christ as bridegroom. Julian of Norwich, in her sickbed visions of 1373, saw a hazelnut in the palm of her hand, no larger than that, and was told that it contained everything that is. She asked her Lord what it meant, and the answer that came, repeated over and over through her sixteen revelations, is Love was His meaning. The Rhineland women mystics (Hadewijch, Mechthild, Marguerite Porete) wrote of love so totally that the seeking soul and the loved God become one substance. Annihilated soul is Marguerite’s phrase for the result.
The Sufi poets work the same recognition in another vocabulary. Rumi, Hafiz, Attar all speak of the lover and the Beloved as no longer two. The Bhakti tradition of India, from the Bhagavata Purana through Tukaram and the Marathi sants, names the ground of being as Krishna or Vithoba and the recognition as devotion.
In the Advaita tradition, where the surface is so often austere, the heart-centred core is not absent. Ramana Maharshi was visibly devoted to Arunachala and to his mother. Nisargadatta said that his teacher’s word, repeated, brought the love so high it overflowed. Atmananda Krishna Menon and the Direct Path teachers carry forward the recognition that love and awareness are not two. What you are, what you love, and what loves you are not three things.
