a. Love’s essential characteristics. It is especially important first to understand what for the Course seems to be Love’s primary function. Then we will examine the most general features that belong to It in relation to that function.
i. The function of uniting. In one passage we find:
“10 What God did not give you has no power over you, and the attraction of love for love remains irresistible. 11 For it is the function of love to unite all things unto itself, and to hold all things together by extending its wholeness.”(12,VIII,7,10-11)
Here we need to focus on statement 11. In this, the Course is quite clear that the function of Love is to unite all things. This is based on what seems to be Its most interior or central characteristic: wholeness. That is perhaps best understood as the foundation of what makes Love, and anything It touches on, completely one. This may be difficult for our minds to grasp, accustomed as they are to thinking in terms of pluralities that involve many sorts of division, which are by their very meaning lacking in complete wholeness. Something we think of as a whole, for example, what we call a ‘human being,’ is not understood in its relationships with all other beings, but as a whole constituted of many parts. That being is only a ‘partial whole.’ However, despite that tendency, we do recognize wholes that are the unities of various parts: one’s body is a whole of many limbs and organs; the collection of things we see belong to a whole that is the current field of visual perception; even the many moments of our experience we can think of as a whole that we might name ‘our life till now’ and recognize that this whole continues to enlarge itself as we continue to live. Thus, the notion of ‘wholeness’ is not altogether unfamiliar to us. While it may be difficult to understand what is the wholeness that is central to Love, which, as has been pointed out, is thought of as having its primary or original form in the Love that is God, we can perhaps come to a somewhat fuller grasp of what that may involve.
Ordinarily, we think of ‘uniting’ as what acts on what is in some way not united, composed of differing or separate parts or aspects, so as to bring all those parts or aspects together into a single whole. Thus, although we might have many different visual perspectives in seeing an apple, along with many touch, taste, and smell impressions of it, we think of it as a single thing: the apple that is sitting in a bowl. That synthesis or uniting of all those different perceptions is primarily by way of forming an idea, a concept, of this particular apple. In this, we do not necessarily conclude that all those different perceptions are somehow pulled together, but rather that the apple is the one entity or being from which all those differing perceptions are expressed. Of course, we do not perceive through our senses this single whole apple, but only think of it or hold it as an idea in our mind. While it may be the case that the formation of that idea was preceded by a sequence of many different perceptions, once it is present in the mind we hold it there in thought as a single whole about which we tie together any further perceptions we may have regarding it.
However, it is not intrinsic to a whole that it involves many different, separated parts. Its wholeness may express in parts or aspects, but in so far as it is a whole, the presence of parts is not necessary. This is perhaps most easily exhibited in the idea of a point. A point, by definition, has no parts, yet it is a single whole. We may think of parts or aspects related to it by considering its relationship with other points (or by visualizing it from different perspectives), but the point, as a point, is a simple single whole that has no parts or aspects in itself. Thus, we can form an idea of a whole that is in no way divided or divisible. If we now apply this to our thinking about God’s Love, we can begin to recognize that Its wholeness can be, in itself, completely without parts or separate aspects. Whatever aspects or parts we may think of, such as Its relationship to things created, which may lead us to speak of differing relationships, these do not in any way undo the single wholeness that belongs to It. Nor should saying “Love is whole” be taken as implying that there are two different things because we use two different words or ideas. Similarly, to say “Love unites all things” should not be taken as implying that there is one thing, Love, and many other things that It unites. There is only one fundamental ‘thing,’ Love, which is present in all that we might want to refer to as ‘things’ – perhaps better thought of as ‘processes.’ Although that seems to involve asserting that the one single Whole is different from those other things, this does not follow; it only seems to be implied as a result of the way we interpret our use of the words.
