The Arrow of Love

 

“When love beckons to you, follow him, though his ways are hard and steep. And when his wings enfold you, yield to him, though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.” – Kahlil Gibran

When Cupid’s arrow comes to you, what do you do? When El Morya or Mother Mary, Gautama Buddha or Kuan Yin comes knocking at the door of your heart, what do you do? When—in the guise of a finicky friend or a complaining child or an ailing parent—one of the Masters comes knocking at the door of your heart, what do you do?

Do you look through the peephole before you decide whether or not you will open the door? Do you say, “Not now, I’m busy. I’m not ready. I’ve got too much happening. Have you tried next door yet?” Or do you fling wide the doors, and let yourself be wounded by the arrows of love? Only when you open those doors do you stand a chance of finding what you’re really looking for in life which, when you get right down to it, is a love tryst with the divine.

The Love Initiations of the Christian Mystics

The Christian mystics talk about spiritual union and the love initiations that accompany it. Thérèse of Lisieux said that from the age of fourteen she experienced “assaults of love” that consumed her “like a veritable flame.” “I was in the choir,” she once wrote, “when I felt myself suddenly wounded by a dart of fire so ardent that I thought I should die….There is no comparison to describe the intensity of that flame. It seemed as though an invisible force plunged me wholly into fire….But oh! what fire! what sweetness!” So enflamed was she by a love that is beyond this world that she wrote in her autobiography, “O Jesus, my vocation is found at last—my vocation is love.”

One of the most famous encounters recorded in mystical literature is the ecstasy of another Teresa—Teresa of Avila. In a vision, the Lord showed Teresa a small angel holding a large golden heart tipped with fire.

She wrote: “It seemed to me this angel plunged the dart several times into my heart. When he drew the dart out, I thought he was carrying off with him the deepest part of me; and he left me all on fire with a great love of God.”

Jesus told Catherine of Genoa that “these flaming darts of an irresistible love are like waves of fire. They flow from My breast,” Jesus said, “and communicate such ardor and interior power to man that he can now do nothing else but love, remaining inseparably united with his God.”

Unable to adequately express the overwhelming love she felt for God, Catherine of Genoa simply said, “If one drop of that love which my heart feels… were to fall into Hell, Hell itself would altogether turn into eternal life.”

Isn’t this the love we all seek? The love that will heal. The love that with one single drop will transform someone’s world. Just think what we could do if we had that kind of love! But in order to have that kind of love, we need to open our hearts—all the way. And as we know, it is not always easy to do that. Because of the wounds of the past, we close up when loving gets too painful. We sometimes have to contact deep levels of hurt in order to resolve the painful record and move on.

---

This excerpt is from the lecture Accelerating the Quality of Your Heart by Elizabeth Clare Prophet published in the 1999 Pearl of Wisdom Vol. 42 No. 7. This lecture is available on AscendedMasterLibrary.org searching on the event date of “2/13/1999” and author “Elizabeth Clare Prophet”.

The lecture was followed by Ascended Lady Master Nada’s Meditation for Healing Past Hurts, available as an audio download at Ascended Master Library or on the An Ovoid of Love DVD at The Summit Lighthouse online store.