Book review: Love is Letting go of Fear

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by Gerald G. Jampolsky, MD

★★★★★

This book is not the usual type of selection for a religion blog, is it? I’m not sure God is even mentioned in the book. But Love is, and God is Love, right? For all you Bible scholars out there, we shouldn’t get so wrapped up in our fascinating scholarly pursuits that we forget the reason for our religion in the first place.

At the risk of over-analyzing a simple book with a simple message, I confess it struck a chord with me partly because of my recent studies in the Gospel of John. Here’s why: like many scriptures, this book pits good against evil as clearly as God versus Satan, only this time it’s love versus fear. If, at the moment, one of the two (love or fear) is guiding your actions and thoughts, the other is not. Why? Well, according to Jerry, it’s because love lives in the present, and fear lives in a reflection of the past into the future. This is a lesson taught over and over. Let go of the past and future, and live in the present.

As Jerry says in the book, “Wouldn’t our lives be more meaningful if we looked to what has no beginning and no ending as our reality? Only Love fits this definition of the eternal. Everything else is transitory and therefore meaningless.”

Now, doesn’t that sound an awful lot like John, the Gospel of Love? Eternal life is ours for the grasping, by living in the eternal now. I’m reminded of another book review I just completed: My Stroke of Insight.

This is a short little book with cute illustrations that you can read in a couple hours. It’s a 25^th anniversary reprint of a book that made a big splash in 1974, and it’s worth the two-hour investment.