In a vast
universe which often seems sinister and unaware of us, we need the
presence and shelter of love to transfigure our loneliness. This cosmic
loneliness is the root of all inner loneliness. All of our life,
everything we do, think and feel is surrounded by nothingness. Hence, we
become afraid so easily. The fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart
say that all of human life stands under the shadow of nothingness, the umbra nihili.
Nevertheless, love is the sister of the soul. Love is the deepest
language and presence of soul. In and through the warmth and creativity
of love, the soul shelters us from the bleakness of that nothingness. We
cannot fill up our emptiness with objects, possessions or people. We
have to go deeper into that emptiness, then we will find beneath
nothingness the flame of love waiting to warm us.
