Lead With Love & Let Love Rule
A paradoxical prayer, heart-shaped totems, and the possibility of radical resilience
Somewhere in the second half of life when I realized that New Year’s resolutions created more anxiety than motivation, I started writing a short prayer each year as a spiritual practice that was more forgiving and less outcome-based. This year, when illness and ennui ushered in the new year, a dear long time friend sent me the encouragement that I could not muster. Out of our text exchange came this year’s short prayer:
Holy Spirit,
Show me the way to lead with Love,
Remind me each day to let Love rule.
Selah
Or simply: Lead with Love & let Love rule. This year’s prayer is a paradox of action and acquiescence, a choice that seems mutually exclusive. When “this or that” seems logical, how is “yes, and” possible? Is it possible to both “go and do likewise” and also “be still”?
It echos my similar frustration with the personal growth mantras “radical acceptance” and “radical release.” Fundamentally those two goals seem to be at odds: how can one both “accept all” and “let it all go”? How can I be expected to distinguish when to rest and when to release? The heightened evaluation required to decide between the two oppositional commands is often at the root of my own peculiar anxiety. And the inevitable indecision creates a state of living contradiction that divides my energy rather than become a paradox that channels it.
It’s curious. Contradiction and paradox, often used synonymously, are very different states of perception. Contradiction requires certainty, demands choice, divides energy. Paradox assumes mystery, allows inclusivity, channels energy. Contradiction is divided into two clear states of opposition. Paradox allows for a magnetic overlap of two oppositional forces that create a shared field of potential perception expansion. (Think the center of Vesica Pisces or Venn diagram.) But what is the magnetic force that converts contradiction into paradox? What is the one state of being that is void of choice, judgement, condition, outcome, validation?
Sometimes answers come in symbols and sometimes those symbols show up in everyday life. Lately, I’ve been finding a lot of hearts—or hearts have been finding me. As far as symbology goes, the heart has never been my first choice. If a sweater was decorated with hearts, I couldn’t put it down fast enough. I generally have an allergy to heart shaped decor of any kind. But lately….I’ve been finding hearts when I’m not looking. In sand, in salad, in the sky. If it’s not a cloud laughing love my way, it’s a baby spinach leaf throwing a kiss, or broken sea shells winking at me, or a piece of random driftwood refusing to be overlooked. This summer I was even struck by how my backyard figs resemble an anatomical heart in shape, color, and texture.
Is the “universe trying to tell me something” as my woo friends would say? I guess I may have to admit is that yes, yes it is. It may be laughing at me, in fact. Every “random” heart-shaped totem becomes a reminder that the gravitational pull that beats at the center of all life is Love. Love is the force that fuses opposition into paradox. Love is the state of radical resilience (1) that makes both radical acceptance and radical release possible. Love is the magnet that holds all. Love is at the center of all. Love is action, yes, and release, yes, but above of all, Love is a state of being. And when faith falters or language fails, small tangible gifts appear when I’m least looking as a humble reminder to hold the unexplainable and incomprehensible with the simple directive to Love and be Love.
This was always understood by my dear friend. For the 40 years we’ve known each other, her answer to all of life’s challenges has been to turn to love—a solution that I understood in the abstract (for her) but never pragmatically understood (for me). It’s taken nearly half a century to repair the cognitive dissonance that stood between my heart, my mind, and my intuition. A few brief text exchanges from an old friend crystallized this awareness and took the form of a longer form prayer—an anthem actually! (her words, my additions and edits, with a little help from Lenny and Bono).
Lead With Love, Let Love Rule
Lead with Love—
May we hold beauty, joy, and hope as we walk through the unlovely, unknown, the unthinkable.
Let Love rule—
May the force of love and logic behind the universe reveal itself brightly and boldly to us and our desperate world in need of it.
Lead with Love— May we see divinity within each other as we greet each day because there is so much to distract us from it.
Let Love rule— May we walk together through the soul-searching to keep our feet planted firmly to still dream wildly—or simply believe.
Lead with Love, Let Love rule: Just keep praying— Our soul’s cry, Our heart’s sigh— And lift up Love.
Prayer anthem: Words by Lisa M., shaped with a few additions and edits of mine, and a little help from Bono and Lenny Kravitz.
Link to a brief more eloquent definition of radical resilience at Richard Rohr’s Center of Action and Contemplation.