Take all the images of love set apart that you have made and extend them outside love’s doors. What difference would a world of love make to those who lock their doors upon the world? How vast the reaches where their world of love could extend once love joined the world. How little need for the angry ones to retain their anger when love has joined the world. For love does join the world, and it is within this joining that love abides, holy as itself. C: 4.25

…[I]ssues, when removed from feelings, still remain issues. They remain social causes, environmental causes, political causes. The cause of all these issues is fear. The cause and effect of love is all that will replace these causes of fear with the means and end that will transform them along with you. You are means and end. It is within your power to be saviors of the world. It is from within that your power will save the world. D:Day10.37

I began my time at my cabin window wondering why I am not heartbroken over events of the past week, the election that named our new president of the United States.

The election of 2008 came to mind and I knew that if Barack Obama had lost that election, heartbreak is what I would have felt. Obama gave me hope. And so I concluded that it would have taken hope in one of our 2016 candidates to cause me to feel heartbreak in ones defeat.

Our collective disenchantment with the establishment, or “the old” is perhaps what this election came to reveal. I heard one commentator say that if the democrats had realized the extent of the public’s disenchantment they would have supported Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton.

Now they know.

Yet this was not enough solace and I was in need of Jesus and his messages of love. Yet what I was reminded of as I went to A Course of Love, was a statement that has been challenged a time or two:

You do not yet believe nor understand that the urges that you feel are real, and neither good nor bad. Your feelings in truth come from love, your response to them is what is guided by fear. Even feelings of destruction and violence come from love. You are not bad, and you have no feelings that can be labeled so. Yet you are misguided concerning what your feelings mean and how they would bring love to you and you to love. C: 5.11

The key to understanding this passage is about response. Is your response to what you feel guided by fear, or by love?

Our feelings are of love—but they are distorted by fear. Who hasn’t experienced this distortion? Who among us is not able to recognize it when we see it displayed?

To see that all of our feelings are of love, we’re asked to enter into a relationship with each and suspend our judgment of all.

And so we return to this in The Dialogues Day 10: Power, hearing again, in vs. 31-34 about these feelings:

If you are being called to acknowledge these feelings, what are you being called to do with them? You are being called to respond to them with acceptance and love. As a man, I took a stand for the powerless and called them to power. I am still doing so. Not because any of you are powerless but because you do not know your power. If there is one thing associated with my life more so than any other, it was this. I was an advocate for all to know their power. Do you think that my advocacy was a social statement for the times in which I lived? Or do you not see that it is the same now as then? 10.31

All the issues that those you would call spiritual leaders are called to champion or censor have their roots in timeless and universal spiritual truths. It is the timeless and universal that you are called, in unity, to respond to and with. But this response will not be generated without the feelings that precede them! …  When speaking of the many issues facing your world in this time, we are speaking of situations that would seem to be extreme and to call for extreme measures. The only extreme measure called for now is the same extreme measure that I called for during my life. It is the call to embrace your power. 10.32

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, turn your thoughts not to ideals of social activism, to causes, or to championing any one side over another. Turn not to your thoughts but to your feelings and go where they lead. And everywhere they lead you, remember one thing only. Remember to embrace your power. The power of love is the cause and effect that will change the world by returning you, and all your brothers and sisters, to who they are in truth. This cannot be done from without but must be done from within. It is the transformation that is caused within that will affect the world without. 10.33

The power you must come to rely upon is the power of your own Self to create and express the cause and effect that is the power of love. 10.34

Some have seen verse 10.33 as a call against social activism. I do not see it that way. Some may find their hearts calling them to do just that. Some won’t. Each of us only need to be concerned with responding to our own heart’s call with love. When we respond with love rather than fear, we will stay united with the Cause of Love and work always toward unity.

Jesus concludes in this way:

Although I need no awareness of the issues facing your time in order to speak to you of such things, I am aware of them. So is every other living thing because all that lives exists in relationship. What I have often referred to as the urgency of this time has been partially because of these issues and partially because of your readiness. It is no accident that these two aspects of urgency are converging. When your reliance on all that exists apart from your Self—your reliance on science and technology and medicine and military might—has been shown to be unfounded, a new source of reliable power is finally sought with the tenacity with which these other sources of seeming power have been sought. This is what has occurred. This is the time at which we stand.  10.35

All of the solutions to the issues facing the world and those who live upon it have been pursued separately from one another and from God— until recently. Now unity is being sought and unity is being found. 10.36

You are means and end.