BODY MECHANICS

A Call for Love

by Alan Cohen

Dee recently went into the post office to mail a package while I waited in the car. She returned with tears in her eyes. She had encountered a particularly nasty clerk who didn’t even want to tell her any optional rates for mailing her package. Dee had to resist the temptation to argue with the clerk or criticize her.

Then the clerk stepped away for a moment and as she walked, Dee could see that the woman was in great pain, physically and psychically. Her body was stiff and bent, and her heart was obviously broken. The environment in which she worked was oppressive, with flickering, humming fluorescent lights, and a machine inside the office making an ongoing beep beep beep like a truck’s backup signal. In that moment Dee’s attitude shifted from resistance to compassion. The woman was older and Dee felt sad she had to work at that age in a stifling environment to sustain herself.

A Course in Miracles tells us that all human actions are either pure expressions of love, or calls for love. Anyone who is upset, angry, or nasty is in pain. Hurt people hurt people. No one at peace with him or herself would do anything to hurt anyone else. The Course urges us to not take the nastiness of others personally. Their dark actions are not about you. They speak of that person’s consciousness. They are a call for love.

There is an African tribe in which when a woman knows she is pregnant, she goes into the wilderness with some friends and together they pray to hear the song of the child. When the women attune to the child’s soul signature, they translate it into a chant and teach it to all the villagers. When the child is born, the villagers gather and sing the child into the world with his or her unique song.

The villagers also sing the child’s song at significant transition point in the child’s life, such as the first day of education, the adulthood initiation, marriage, and eventually death. Yet there is one other time when the tribe members sing the child’s song. If the child commits a crime or socially aberrant act, he is placed at the center of the village and everyone in the village gathers around him and sings his song to him. They do not punish him. Instead, they realize that the person has acted antisocially because he is in pain, disconnected from his self and his song. The song reminds him who he really is, and calls him to come home to himself.

All of the ills of society are a result of a sense of disconnection with self, others, and God. The answer to our problems, then, is to restore connection, to regard fear-based acts as calls for love. In the movie Legally Blonde, a young lawyer is assigned to defend a woman accused of killing her husband. The lawyer eventually figures out that the woman is innocent. “My client is an aerobics instructor,” she tells her colleagues. “She has lots of endorphins running through her system, which make her feel good. No one who feels good would need to kill someone.”

You have the power to heal by reframing hurtful actions—by others or yourself—as a call for love. If you love as the antidote, you may participate in a miracle. Louise Hay once asked me what I write when I sign autographs in books. I told her what I write and then asked her what she writes. “I just write "Love heals,'” she answered. Maybe that’s all any of us need to write.