Love is the most powerful force in the universe, Anne Hathaway’s character tells us in so many words in the recent movie, Interstellar. It is a phrase that has been uttered, as if by some Divine script, for millennia, by those who study the ways and means of the cosmic committees. Poets, musicians, storytellers, spiritual leaders, friends, partners, spouses, those who tell stories of love with their very lives, and occasionally creative theologians, academicians and quantum physicians will slip through the wormhole and find, at last, beating in the heart of the world, beyond all knowledge, pure love.
The movie Interstellar brings back into the collective view, once again, this “theory of everything,” the belief that there is one singular unity that holds galaxies and worlds together, we call it love, because that is how we feel and know it. Some of the great writings we have in our collective world stories called the Wisdom Tradition, teach us “love is strong as death, as fierce as the grave.” (Song of Songs 8:6). The mystic/Sufi poet Rumi does not speak of love as something unattainable or a flight of fancy, he grounds love as a force stronger than our human will,
...Love flows down, the ground submits to the sky and suffers what comes. Tell me, is the earth worse for giving in like that? Don’t put blankets over the drum! Open completely. Let your spirit ear listen to the green dome’s passionate murmur.
The Apostle Paul who had a close up, knock out encounter with pure love that caused him to stop murdering those who claimed unity with Christ, the one who had shown the healing power of the Divine in human form for all time. From that moment on, all Paul could do was talk about love. He wrote his passionate love plea,
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. (1 Cor. 13)
In other words, do not believe, dear ones, in anything as strongly as you believe in love.
Interstellar brings back into our view the choices we have each day. All of our great traditions seem to tell us that love is a choice and yet it is something that has already been chosen in us, something, as Paul tells us, we already have as our higher way or higher power, placed in us by forces beyond our control. Even the recovery from trauma, brokenness, addiction, grief, loss and pain requires that the victim embrace a different narrative for her life that begins and ends with Divine love, in order to find healing and wholeness. In fact, it is very often through these experiences of pain, these dark nights of the soul, that we break this membrane of the human ego or will and find, at last, that story written upon the walls of our soul, and begin to work out of our truer nature, the sacred in us. In the Christian tradition, we call this the soul’s birth, and it somehow refuses to come fully into our awareness without an immersion into love. As we take this voyage into the imprint of the sacred in us, the space of God, we begin to discover this connection that unites all things living and dying and living again, the force of the universe, we begin to experience an awakening to life.
To find the “most powerful force in the universe” one has only to discover what is already there, love. Today, choose love. If you are uncertain what love looks like or feels like, check out the writings of Rumi, Hafiz, Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon), 1 Corinthians 13. Find a religion that enables you to practice love through compassionate (not dominant) service to others, this is how love is most readily spread. If you are lost in your own emotional nightmare, try the 12 steps and find an AA, EA, OA or Al-Anon group that meets regularly. You can find any of these online through Google search. There are pathways to love, they are generally found by choosing to let go of the ways of being that have held you down and moving towards the grip of love. To love someone, or love yourself, try letting go of criticism and negative talk and instead, use words and thoughts of nurture, support and love. See how your world changes, feel your own healing. Love is the most powerful force in the universe.
Here I am playing a song taken from one of the great love texts, Songs on Song of Songs here: