The Love for a Child and the Line Loop from Heaven

This blog is just a simple line of thought, yet a most profound one. It is about the love one feels for a child and what it did for me.

Despite being very devoted to healing and self-realization, to Love of God, Love of Truth, I am a stubborn one. Call me a stiff-necked Jew. I knew how all-important Love is. Know it like the back of my hand. Feel it? Embrace it? Not always. The knowledge sometimes dwells like a fat king up in the palace of the mind, and doesn’t want to get off his lazy ass and go down to the people to do the love that is his kingdom to rule over. And especially the self-love part. Love they neighbor as you love yourself is a fundamental premise of both Judaism and Christianity. And the math adds up to the point that you will love your neighbor as you actually love yourself, so, ahem, love yourself.

I recognized in the early days of my having an auto-immune disease (myasthenia gravis) that I was quite deficient in the self-love department, or rather, what you’d see in the self-love department was a taskmaster, pushing myself, harsh self-criticism and strict imposition of perfection that were impossible to satisfy. The result was the faithful army of white blood cells obeying the commands of the master – Self Attack!!! So the last twenty or so years have been an ongoing struggle to love myelf, to find a reason to love myself, to shed the falsities that blocked me from the goblet of auto-appreciation. I’ve ebbed and flowed. Done better some days than others. Haven’t passed with flying colours but would have made it through the Love Thyself University with a passable GPA and did better in the later years than the earlier ones. But something was missing. A key point. A lesson where the professor laid it out just right for me to get what I was missing.

The line of truth that I was missing came to me when I became a father.

Everyone was surprised when I became a father. Those closest to me the most. They, and myself included, never thought I would be a father. I was very absorbed in my work and my path to self-actualization was so high up on the priority list that anything that could, in any way deter or delay me from spending all the time I needed to become enlightened and liberated, was viewed with vigorous abhorence. It was a land of much self, ironic since that land of self lacked love of self, so we could write it SELF love land, but the font size of love should have been like a 4 and the SELF like a 20. There was little room for others.

When I found out I was going to be a father I pretty much imploded and turned to swiss cheese. I actually had a massive return of the symptoms of the auto-immune disease because of the conflict that occurred in knowing I would have another to take care of and couldn’t spend all the time I needed mastering myself, or brewing up the concoctions in my alchemy lab that would yield an elixir of enlightenment and long life. I know now that the need to master myself came from that deficiency in loving myself and was that illusory sought after compensation that we think will get us what we want, but what actually becomes a monster that is never fed with enough taskmastering, or self-criticism at not having achieved the empty goal. In short, arriving at the doorstep of my worst fear, I freaked out, got morbidly sick, and nearly died on several occasions.

In the throes of the weakness of my illness, I railed against Heaven that my life should take such a turn for the worse and all that hard work I had pummeled out on the path of self-mastery was now hijacked by this tiny human showing up to be loved and protected. I was mad at God and thought, literally believed, something had gone terribly wrong.

The Line Loop From Heaven

Man plans and God laughs, right? Or, the even more common cliché, God knows what’s best for us, played in my mind and I sought to apply it as a feeble consolation, but it just got to hang out with the lazy King and did little for satisfying my suffering soul. Until one day it just made sense. A Line from Heaven wove itself right through me, dragging the king from his indolent dominion, bringing me to continuing education at Self-Love University and making another important piece crystal clear for me.

It all happened when I was watching my daughter play on the floor. It hit me so hard that my eyes flooded with tears and my chest expanded well beyond the confines of its physical parameters. I realized how much I loved her. So much. So much it’s beyond words. So much it feels like there’s an imminent internal explosion . In that awareness, I saw that I am not defective. I am actually capable of Love. That revelation in and of itself upgraded my GPA at Self-Love U greatly. But the Line from Heaven wasn’t finished. It had to come full circle and loop back to the Source of it all.

The Heavens were trying to tell me something. When I got this next lesson, a deep silence rocked my soul and the tears escalated not in volume, but in intensity, and I sobbed like a soldier who gets to see his family as he returns from war, who had thought he would die in that muddy trench.

What I realized was the answer to the question, “If I love my child so much, how much does God love me, being a child of God and all?”

And the next question and answer was born from the Line of Heaven continuing in me helping to complete the circle, the loop. “If God loves me as much as I love my child, then can I not love myself?”

Of course, The Lord loves a ton more than I have been capable of and certainly does work in mischievious ways. What I thought I wanted, what I thought I knew I needed, was like an endless fruitless effort banging on an empty drum compared to the majesty that came from surrendering to my worse fears. In having a child, the Creator, who is Love, got to show me what I am calling the Line Loop from Heaven. I have no doubt about how much I love this child. This showed me that I can love. That paved the way for recognition of how much God loves us being His/Her children and to close the loop, all it took was the last step. If I can love this child so much, and God loves me, can I then not love myself as much?

That closed the Line Loop from Heaven for me.

God is Good. God is Love. We are God. 

Shalom Aleichem. Salaam Alaikum. Peace be with you.