I want to wish you a lovely Valentine’s Day, a day brimming with the love of God filling your heart to overflowing. According to early Christian history, Saint Valentine died a martyr, but while in prison he healed the daughter of his jailor of blindness. When he wrote her a letter, he signed it, “Your Valentine.” Saint Valentine not only forgave his jailor, but healed his daughter—such a loving thing to do.
Master wrote so beautifully of charity. Charity has taken on different meanings down through time, from its original meaning of love, to acts of love, to helping someone in need, to non-profit organizations. But, let us examine the word from its headwaters, love and acts of love as Master does:
“Charity is born of sympathy. By empathy, a quality of Omnipresence, a person may transfer his consciousness to that within suffering men; and experience, as his own, their griefs and limitations. It is then that the charitable desire to offer help springs forth.
“Selfishness cramps the omnipresent soul in a miserable prison of limiting material desires. You should desire salvation so that you may give it to everyone else. You should desire to drink God’s nectar of bliss so that you may share it with all. That is true charity.”
Master so beautifully connects the act of giving back to its source, Omnipresence, from which empathy naturally springs. In Omnipresence you feel what others feel, however it is not a simple connection to another, rather you take with you awareness of God’s love and compassion as well as His clarity of truth and right behavior. If someone is struggling with staying true to their higher Self, then through Omnipresence you see the future consequences of wrong actions, and you know all of the suffering that individual will go through; your heart goes out to such a one even as they fall short of the goal. And one who suffers the effects of past actions in body, mind or soul, you feel such compassionate understanding for that one. In both cases you feel the fullness of God’s love flowing through your own heart in Omniscient empathy.
In seeing all creation as an expression of Ananda, God’s bliss, then you see the truth, even as Sant Kabir did when he said, “I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty.” Truly, we swim in an ocean of love, an ocean of bliss, it is all around us, we are immersed in it; we need only drink of what is so abundantly permeating the air we breathe.
And this is my Saint Valentine’s wish for you my dear One, that you may drink to your heart’s content from Living Waters of Spirit; that your heart may run full to overflowing with love for God and all creation. That when you do an act of charity, it is first an act of love, an action that is a natural outcome of Omnipresence. And when you are the receiver of someone’s loving act, that you receive the love behind the act and are conscious of it first. In this way, it is truly God giving to God. It is in that spirit that you please me most in receiving all the love of God that is, even now, overflowing my heart and I that I see flowing out to you now. “Your Valentine.”