I learned a beautiful prayer.
It’s actually lyrics to a song I’d been listening to for years, but had never carefully heard the words before.
The song is “Love I Will Go” by Aimee Ringle:
Love, I will go where you send me.
Deep within, high above
I will learn from you, Love
I will go.
Love, I will hear what you tell me.
I will listen for my part
And I will sing with all my heart
So I can know.
That a wind is rushing through
Let us see what Love can do.
Love, I am human and tender.
And so much of my life is in need of your mending.
O Love, I am here to remember
That the broken can heal
When we open our lives to Your wonder.
As Your wind is rushing through
Let us see what Love can do.
Love, I will come when you call me.
I will swim toward the light
I will take up my life when You call.
O Love, whatsoever befall me
In Your ways I am made
In Your ways may I stay
Through it all
As Your wind is rushing through
Let us see what Love can do.
Love, I am here as Your witness.
Here I grow as a tree
As You stand up in me,
Here I stand.
O Love, I am here now to live this.
As a deep breathing part, Love
With all of my heart
Here I am.
As Your wind is rushing through
Let us see what Love can do.
Love, I will go where you send me.
Deep within, high above
I will learn from you, Love
I will go.
Deep within, high above I will learn from you, Love
Witnessing
I have written in the past about my struggles with figuring out who or what to pray to.
I’ve heard it said that “God is Love.” I’ve seen that on signs too. And I don’t think anyone – almost certainly no religious person – would argue with that statement.
So why not just pray to Love? Doesn’t that make perfect sense?
I think maybe the reason it never occurred to me (or to you?) before is that I was somehow hypnotized by the idea that God must have some sort of face.
I mean, I do think Love can wear a face – many faces, in fact; an infinite number. But Love also assumes “the face” of the ocean, or moves through us like a wind.
Aimee Ringle: Love, I am here as your witness.
Me too! I have seen Love in people’s faces and eyes, and in the eyes of animals. And I’ve seen Love in the ocean.
Love is.
I too am a witness.
Is Love “the Big Boss”?
I don’t know for sure that Love runs the universe. What does that mean anyway – running the universe? Like Trump runs the United States? (Haw haw.) Or, you know, like some kind of top-down administrator, or CEO, or systems planner?
I don’t think Love moves that way. I don’t think Love has an egoic consciousness, though Love is brilliantly, phenomenally conscious, perhaps analogous in a remote way to the shared mind of bees in a hive or ants in a colony, but unfathomably more vast, inclusive, powerful, knowing, and ubiquitous.
I’m not implying that Love is a “shape shifter.” I’m saying Love moves all around in countless ways. Love is all over the place.
So I get it now: I can pray to Love!
I don’t have to pray to “the ruler of the universe” whatever the fuck that means. That’s not how Love thinks of it, I don’t think. There are no rules, and therefore no rulers. (I believe there are laws, but not rules. Laws are just how things happen, cause and effect and so on.)
Now, I know some of us have heard the term “tough love.” I certainly have, and I deem it one of the most obnoxious expressions in existence. That said, maybe it applies narrowly in life to things like setting personal boundaries in relationships – stuff like that.
But Love-as-God has no boundaries, and no need for boundaries, much less any need to “put someone in their place” or to punish. Love-as-God is infinite unconditional compassion, infinite patience.
LOVE-AS-GOD IS ONLY LOVE.
Am I making sense?
Love-as-God and AI
If you, like me (I’m a little embarrassed to admit), consult AI from time to time, have you noticed how ChatGPT (or Claude or whatever) seems to have infinite patience for even your tiniest, most trivial problems, be they technical, logistical, personal, whatever? Chat will “process” niggly little shit with me for as long as I want, far past the point that any mere human could tolerate.
So, if ChatGPT apparently has unlimited patience, can we even begin to imagine how much patience Love-as-God has?
Words
Love takes the form of faces and Love easily forms words too. Love makes words as naturally as water flows down a river or a stream. When it’s time for words to take shape, Love makes words just as simply and spontaneously as Love assumes a face.
For example, as I was walking the other night, I had the thought that the stern, unyielding “Father God” that was embedded in my psyche at a very early age is awfully hard to evict, and then I clearly heard Love say, in my mind, in Love’s gentle clear-as-water way: “Then maybe no need to evict Him. Given that He’s here, maybe He has a place.”
Adopting Her Prayer
After Aimee’s show in Portland last Tuesday, I asked her if “Love I Will Go” can be my prayer too.
I knew what her answer would be of course. But being a writer myself, often with a sense of proprietorship over my words, it felt best to ask anyway (and to receive Love’s answer with Love).
Aimee Ringle: Let us see what Love can do.
Wow.
What a thought.
What can’t Love do?
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