There is a current of love-energy that flows between Earth below and Sun above. The central channel of your spine is the riverbed. The streaming is as delicate and powerful as the tingling touch of lovers.
The Radiance Sutras

Dear deep soul explorer,

Our bodies respond to the movements of the planets and stars whether we are aware of it or not.

And we’re not. I certainly wasn’t. I spent most of my life oblivious to the intimate dance going on between me and Mother Earth and Father Sky.

Growing up, I heard no one speak of my body as a beautiful expression of Mother Earth. Quite the opposite.

In the strict Catholic world of the 1950s, the body was not only not beautiful, it was downright evil. An “occasion of sin” was the term. I was told to subjugate it, fast it, and keep it kneeling as long as possible.

And for heaven’s sake ignore it, especially when it begs to be touched, caressed, kissed. 

So, it came as a shock—and a delicious one—to learn in the midst of my research for Find Your Soul’s Purpose that my body is made of the same stuff as the stars. I am salt water and stardust.

And so are you.

You know what that means? It means we are ancient celestial beings, present in some mysterious molecular form since the beginning. When the universe was breathed into being, you and I were breathed into being.

Boggles the mind, doesn’t it.

I realize now that making this discovery two years ago was a wild first chord in a love song I’m now hearing every day. To me, that first chord sounds a lot like that WILD, impossible to replicate, multi-dimensional opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night.”

I didn’t plan on writing about love songs or The Divine Romance in these Notes from the Field this year. I had other plans. I was going to talk about The Unified Field of Prayer because that’s my next book and the theme for The Soul-Directed Life this year.

But now it seems the only thing I want to tell you, the only thing I can tell you, is that The Divine Romance is real, it’s tangible, it’s alive, and it is singing to you.

The Romance is singing to you in sweet and sometimes outrageous love songs.

You’ve heard that “What you are seeking is seeking you.” Well, it’s true.

Sacred Love Songs have been seeking the ears of my heart for a long, long time. And when I was ready, they found me.

In a very mysterious way.

In the first Notes from the Field this year, I told you what happened when I watched a video of Andrea Bocelli singing an Ed Sheeran song called “Perfect.” It was, and is, a very cute young love song. Or so I thought. But while I was busy tagging my friend who adores Andrea Bocelli, YouTube cued up another Ed Sheeran song, “Thinking Out Loud.”

I liked this one much better, but still cute, young love songs. Right?

Wrong.

I didn’t connect the dots between adorable pop love songs and The Divine Romance right away. So the songs waited for me. They burrowed into my head and popped up in odd moments with their catchy hooks and intriguing lyrics like:

Your love is all I own.

People fall in love in mysterious ways.

In my first post this year, I shared the story of my love encounter with Jupiter and my blissful night hearing love songs being sung to me.

On January 21, I shared that those love songs were Ed Sheeran lyrics. I woke hearing, “People fall in love in mysterious ways, sometimes just the touch of a hand” and danced around the kitchen for days chanting, “We found love right where we are.”

His songs became the soundtrack to my Divine Romance. The lyrics suddenly made perfect sense to me.

They were no longer just a cute young boy singing to a girl or even me singing to myself; they were the Divine reminding me that “We found love right where we are.”

On January 28, I wrote about the parallels between a human romance and a Divine Romance, capping the conversation with the ancient wisdom in The Radiance Sutras: “The god of love is courting you.”

And with that, I thought I had completed a lovely triptych on the Divine Romance and could now shift to writing about The Unified Field of Prayer.

Ha!

The love songs were just warming up. They waited until I was ready to dive beneath the surface connection between love songs and The Romance and drop into The Mystic.

One night I watched “Perfect” and “Thinking Out Loud” again, typing quickly to capture the lyrics for this newsletter, when Ed Sheeran’s newest mega hit popped up. This one I did not like. I did not like it at all. It’s called “The Shape of You” and it’s a testosterone-laden uber-male drumbeat repeating over and over:

I’m in love with your body

I’m in love with the shape of you

Ick!

Those words could not be a divine love song.

But that line, “I’m in love with your body,” bypassed my tightlipped censor and lodged in my heart, waiting until I was ready to hear it with new ears.

I happened in the midst of reading Thomas Merton. (Boy, would he be surprised.)

I have a mini-library of Merton’s books from Thoughts in Solitude to New Seeds of Contemplation to his Asian Journal. Plus Learning to Love, his heart-thumping, eye-popping journal about falling in love with a young woman.

I love Thomas Merton. So when I heard Jim Finley on a video event last December say that Merton’s final publication was The Inner Experience, I ordered it right away.

But this book was different. Or maybe I was different. Something happened with this book that opened a door in my heart to a whole new love song.

The same week I began to read The Inner Experience, I was awakened in the middle of the night hearing the words “Sophia’s Voice.” I knew it was the name of my year, my mandala, and an invitation to a whole new layer in my mystical and professional life.

I said yes.

Not knowing what I was saying yes to. But I said yes anyway. Yes, I will be Sophia’s Voice.

So, in one hand I’m holding the call to merge my voice with the Voice of the Divine Feminine and in the other I’m holding The Inner Experiencewritten by a Cistercian monk in the 1950s.

The two, I discovered, don’t always gel. As I dove deeper and deeper into the book, my stomach began to tighten.

I underlined, as I always do, all the sentences that expand my heart. But then, a few pages later, I’d smack into something that constricted my heart and, just in case I missed the problem, my bowels too.

Oh dear.

Finally, one morning, I stopped and shouted NO when Merton used the word “battle” to describe the contemplative life.

And an even louder NO when he said “everything in the soul that is repugnant to God’s will must be completely destroyed.”

The concepts behind his words may well resonate with cosmic truth but the words themselves sound discordant to the ears of my heart.

These ears that are now Sophia’s ears.

After lifetimes of hearing patriarchal language describe our relationship with the Mystery, after lifetimes of swallowing our objections, holding our tongues or having them silenced; after lifetimes of praying as the men want us to pray; my heart knows, and now my body knows, that patriarchal language tells a story that isn’t complete and isn’t accurate.

And doesn’t describe the core of The Romance: Unconditional Love.

It’s been a confusing paradox for a long time, hasn’t it?

They tell us God is love and then they tell us God is angry, or that God is going to judge us, or worse, punish us.

You can’t have both Unconditional Love and Conditional Punishment in the same God.

Not in my God anyway.

And so I put The Inner Experience down. And picked up The Radiance Sutras where I read:

The body of substance
And the body of light fuse into one.

And:

Let your attention glide
Through the centers of awareness
along the spine
With adoring intent.
There is a song to each area of the body
Resonating in sweet vortices.

And this jewel (Sister Mary Margaret never said anything like this!):

Inside the skull there is a place
Where the essences of creation play and mingle—
The ecstatic light of awareness
And the awareness of that light.

The divine feminine and masculine
Sport with one another in that place.
The light of their love-play illumines all space.

Rest in that light
Ever present, and gradually
Awaken into the steady joy of
That which is always everywhere.

My mind may not comprehend the depth of The Radiance Sutras, written in Sanskrit by lovers of the Beloved almost two millennia ago, but my heart does.

And my heart says Yes.

So I should not have been surprised (although I was very surprised) when I woke one morning last week hearing, “I’m in love with your body. I’m in love with the shape of you.”

I turned over, but it wouldn’t stop. I took a shower, but it wouldn’t stop. It wouldn’t stop until I opened the ears of my heart and heard it not as an excited boy lusting after a gorgeous girl, but as the Divine Feminine seducing me with the truth.

She is in love with this body—as it is.

She is in love with this body which is HER body. She is in love with this body which is made of the elements of her creation: stardust and salt water.

Of course, she’s in love with this body. Of course, she loves the shape of me. Not because I’m in perfect shape. I’m not.

She loves this body because She made this body. She infuses this body with love. And She moves in this world in this body.

So now I dance around the kitchen singing “I’m in love with your body. I’m in love with the shape of you.”

I dare say both Thomas Merton and Ed Sheeran would be a surprised.

I highly recommend this love song. Especially if you look in the mirror and realize you are NOT in love with your body.

Try it.

Look in the mirror and open the eyes of your soul to see what the Beloved sees. You are utterly beautiful. You are perfectly made. You are the shape of stardust and salt water. You are a miracle of creation.

Then, open the ears of your heart and hear the Beloved singing the love songs of The Romance to you.

Maybe they sound like the lyrics I’m hearing. Maybe you’ll hear a totally different song.

Whatever you hear, smile. Say Yes.

And dance.

to moving with the love songs of The Beloved,

Janet