Love is indeed heaven upon earth;
since heaven above would not be heaven without it;
for where there is not love, there is fear;
but, “Perfect love casteth out fear.”    ~Penn

How shall I do to love? Believe.
How shall I do to believe? Love. ~Lord Leighton

Perfect love and perfect trust…we have all heard those words many times and yet we all still ponder and wonder at what they may mean. They are simple words, love and trust, but how simple is it really to feel them in anything approaching a perfection of grace. Though, when it comes right down to it, what do we really know about love or trust.

Countless movies have been made about love, numberless books, articles, essays, plays, songs, both secular and spiritual. But, despite all that, love itself remains a mystery. This should be clue number one—that Love, capital letter “L” Love—is not something that can truly be understood, because it is something that in its totality is beyond mere human comprehension.

All that we see and call love, is not truly Love, but an extension into our world of a more than physical power. Not that it can’t be a beautiful, even joyful thing to know here in the material world, and not that it cannot lead to opening yourself up to an experience of the greater Power that all physical expressions of it but represent, but it is fundamentally so much more than that. Like the Divine, Love wears many masks in our world and though it is all around us, we cannot experience it fully while yet in the flesh. Though, we may at times come close, or glimpse it for but the briefest of moments.

The same holds true for Trust. For a perfect form of Trust is also a great power, one that we may only hold shades of in our normal everyday life. For a perfection of anything means that it is pure, complete, and utter—and who may claim to have an utter trust in anything, one where not a single doubt creeps in ever. We live and so we doubt, for that is part of being in a physical body which ages and will eventually die.

But Love, perfect Love, may be felt within the spirit. And when one feels that perfection of Love, then one also knows perfect Trust, for the two go hand in hand. This is not the love of romance, the kind of love which needs to possess, which involves making demands or fearing eventual loss or betrayal, though that is the form that most love takes in life today. This is the Love which is modeled after Divine Love, which is also called agape. Agape is Greek for “love feast,” and it means a form of brotherly love, the plural of which is the love of the brethren for each other. And certainly, we are all brothers in the Craft (although some of us are more properly sisters) and we do feast together.

Agape is the pure power of Love. It is the sort of Love that is the essence of the Divine presence in our lives, which gives life to our very spirits. And so this kind of Love can only be properly felt when you are in accord with your innermost Divine nature, when you stand in the sphere of the spirit that resides within you. The key to accomplishing this is to open your heart, for only then can you touch your soul and feel that Divine Love, feel agape for all, and know utter Trust, which is but another way to describe having absolute faith.

Perfect Trust, Divine Trust, is having a pure and utter confidence and faith that all of your expectations and desires will be fulfilled. Which means that there can be no doubt, none at all, inside you, for perfection of trust is a complete and accomplished fact. It is not a hope, it is not a wish, it is not something you think about and ache for…for if you have such an unalloyed Trust, then you just know it will be. It is having a true faith in the Divine Will, of which you are an integral part, a simple and perfect knowledge that what must happen, will happen. And that it will be a beautiful and joyous thing.

Knowing Love and Trust in their Divine forms within your heart means being at one with your own self as spirit, and so being at one with the world around you and all that happens and does not happen. It’s being absolutely aware that, when it comes right down to it, that “it’s all good.” Though, when you think about it, it does rather sound like a spell—to feel and know with utter certainty that you are one with everyone else and the whole of creation, and that the connection between it all is the power known as Love. While, at the same time, you have an utter certainty of Faith that all you truly desire will be fulfilled. Of course, it must be what you truly desire as an incarnated soul, not the desires born out of fear or anger or shame, to name but a few, all of which throw you out of yourself, out of your center, and involve something rather less than perfection.

But then who among us can know this complete and utter Love and Trust so long as we do not know our own center of being? To achieve this perfection of Love and Trust, you must enter into a different state of consciousness, an altered state of consciousness, and that involves opening your heart, which is the doorway to your spirit. For in our daily lives, we all know doubt, we all know pain and fear and loss and many of us do not know where we are going, let alone trust that we will get there. Some of us do not even know for a certainty who we are. When you open your heart to your own spirit, your own personal spark of the Divine, then you will know…for your spirit does not doubt and is not swayed by any outside influence, good or bad. That is perfection and purity; to be completely and utterly yourself, to be who and what you were born to be.

The words faith and fate are intimately connected, and fate is what is meant to be. When you are in this altered state of consciousness, you know peace and joy, for you also know that all that happens is what is meant to happen. You know that you are immortal, for both life and death are but passing phases. You can see the beauty in all things and in all people, even the one who may be sitting with a crabby face over their coffee at the next table at Starbucks. You wish them all well, but you know that they must each discover their own path for themselves, perfect themselves. You are not moved from your own center by either their happiness or by their fear or anger, even if it is directed at you.

This is Perfect Love and Perfect Trust—and it is not dependant on anyone or anything else in the universe, except existing in your own heart and soul. It does not mean that you need to find just the right people to be in a coven with or to circle with. It has nothing to do with another person’s ability to love or trust you, or with having to find people that you can love and trust. Anything that comes from outside of your self, that is dependent on what someone else does or doesn’t do, is not and can never be perfect.

A pure and complete Love can only come from being absolutely removed from and yet infinitely attached to the world, both conditions to exist within you at the same time. This may sound impossible or contradictory, but when you are in the altered state made possible by being at one with your heart and spirit, then you can and will feel this form of “dispassionate compassion.” You care for the world, for the people around you, but yet this depth of caring can neither hurt nor alter the essential you in any way, for you are complete unto yourself. You know who you are. You know you are the center of the universe. You have Faith. You have Knowledge. And you know peace and joy beyond any earthly measure.

All of which does not mean that you just sit there, communing with the Divine inside you, and do not act. It only means that you act in accord with your own perfect nature and with the Divine Will, which you have placed your own will in alignment with. When you have Perfect Love and Perfect Trust, you will do what you are meant to do, what the Divine put you here in the world to do.

If we are all to stand in Perfect Love and Perfect Trust in our circles, then we need to come to stand there within the boundless circle of our own hearts. It means that our hearts have to be open, so that our spirits may express the Divine light through our bodies…so that we may be Shining Ones. Bright stars come down to the earth to show the way to the Gods. We must be truly free, and yet still be bound to our flesh, for there is a reason we are born to it and we all chose that reason. We all chose to come here, to return again to the world of man.

When we kiss each other in the circle the kiss has ever been more than a sign of simple affection; it is a declaration of loyalty, love and spiritual unity, a hail and a greeting and a mutual sharing of the magickal Powers that give life and form to the universe. One of which is Love and one of which is Trust, two sides of the same coin, the minted gold of which is the Will of the Divine.

© 2009, Veronica Cummer