I came for you, I came for you, but you could not see me. I swam the seas, I traversed the coals, I died a thousand deaths for you. I found my way, I did, I did. But when I got there, you had fallen asleep. You had drunk their potions and I could not wake you.
I got there in time but your eyes were closed.
OF TEN TIMES, we pray for something and then miss the miracle when it actually happens. Many have said, “I wish I could have a great love,” while blind to the fact that it was standing right in front of them. So often the issue is not learning how to attract love, but rather how to recognize love. Especially when we have waited so long, it is often an insidious trick of the mind to make sure we don’t really see it even after it finally arrives.
Sometimes, love arrives as though it were a spaceship landing in the back yard. The captain comes out of the ship and says to us, “Hi, I’m here to beam you up! Come on! We’re going!”
Yet so many times we reject him, saying, “Uh, well, I can’t just leave here so fast. Actually, I can’t even believe you’re here. How long do I have to prepare my things?”
And he says, “You have no time at all. Your entire life has been spent preparing. Now, we must go quickly. If you wait, your eyes will adjust and you will no longer see me. I’ve just landed for a bit, to pick you up. You have an hour, max. You can make further plans from the ship.”
The captain sees that we are bewildered, but so is he. “Haven’t you been asking for this for years?” he asks.
“Well, yes,” we say. “I have. But I guess I didn’t think you were coming. . . . I sort of made a life for myself here, in the meantime.”
“Not that much of one, judging from your prayers at night,” he tells us. “Let’s go, if you’re coming. I can’t wait forever.”
And then we say, if we say it, what is ultimately the most tragic thing we will ever say, and that is, “No, thank you.”
No, I don’t choose the ride, even though I want it desperately. No, I don’t want to beam up now, even though it’s a living hell down here. No, I do not choose the path of wild and radical and authentic love, even though I know I am dying without it. I think I’ll just settle for “good enough.”
And why do we do that? Why do we not receive with open arms the answers to our prayers? Because we ourselves are authoring what will one day look like natural selection. The human race is turning a corner, and those who choose not to make the turn will keep going straight until they fall off the cliff ahead.
Angels are onboard those spaceships, appearing everywhere now, often in the guise of loved ones holding the torch that would light our way through darkness. On the other side of that darkness is the light in which dreams come true. But there are demons in that darkness, to be sure, and we can feel them. They almost paralyze us with fear. All those unloved parts of ourselves are there, ugly and twisted and ready to destroy. They live in the darkness, on the other side of which is paradise itself. Even though the only way to paradise is through the darkness—and even though the fire of the angel’s torch will burn the demons up, not us—we do not trust that. We lack faith. We are staunch and calcified in our refusal to choose love, and so we say to the angel, “No, you go ahead. I’ll stay here.”
The angel looks at us in disbelief; the refusal of ecstasy is unknown in heaven. The space captain can scarcely believe his ears, but noninterference in and respect for the choices of another human being is a must on the enlightened path. Not that you can force anyone onto a spaceship anyway. One only rides on the wings of an angel if one is seriously committed to the experience of heaven. The lure of hell is so real here.
Still, as the ship takes off, the captain looks at the angel onboard and notices that there are tiny sparkling rivers of water, falling from her eyes.
Back at headquarters, the angel reports to higher-ups.
“He chose not to go.”
The superior is silent, witnessing the angel’s pain. The angel continues. “I can hardly believe it. He chose not to go.”
“Do you think he understands the consequences?” asks the superior.
“I don’t know,” says the angel. “I think he thinks that staying there is the more responsible thing to do.”
“Responsible . . . to whom? To what?”
“I don’t know. It’s strange. He’s not ecstatically happy there, but he thinks it’s his duty to stay. He feels it’s an adult situation, and he lives in fear that he is not one.”
“Yes, of course. Well, we’ve seen this before. They choose psychology over poetry. We keep trying to evacuate that realm before the storm hits, but people refuse evacuation.”
“Yes.”
“You prayed for him, of course.”
“Oh, yes. With all my heart.”
“Well. Job well done. Sorry if your heart was a little bruised on this mission. It’s one of the risks, you know. It can happen, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Still, they’re touching creatures. Contentious, but touching.”
“Yes.”
The angel was trained for love, she was disciplined in love, but her tears still flowed.
“You’re excused. You may go.”
As the angel turned around to weep, her superior called her back. “I say, one thing. . . . Do remember—you’ll see him again someday.”
“Will I really, Master? Will I really?”
“Of course you will. You must cling to your own faith at times like these. How else can you convince them of theirs, if you don’t?”
FOR MANY OF US, it’s not that we don’t want the spaceship to come get us, so much as we are completely taken aback by its form. We expect angels to have a different look. We don’t recognize a gift from heaven, and how could we, when we have not truly believed that heaven exists? We don’t quite compute what has occurred until often it’s too late.
We didn’t think this love would be human, with soft eyes and beautiful hands. We’re thrown off by his profession, or her freckles, or his past. We didn’t expect love to awaken our biggest fears and insecurities and doubts. We thought it would bring more immediate comfort. And so we wanted it, but we didn’t. When you’ve lived in a dungeon for a very long time, the light, when you see it, actually hurts your eyes.
Jesus said, “Prepare, for when I come, I will come quickly.” The arrival of a soulful love often comes quickly, like that spaceship in the yard. There is little time to prepare before the flight takes off, just a window of opportunity, a cresting wave and then it’s over. There will be little time to pack one’s bags, so it is best to travel lightly through life. There will be little time to say good-byes, so it’s best not to be living with people you know you should have said good-bye to long ago. We are living in the end times. New beginnings are upon us now.
We cannot burst through the old earth’s atmosphere without another at our side. It takes two to make a spaceship. We can’t generate the power to fuel the ship until we download the forces that only love can burn off. We must be fearless, as only love can make us fearless. We must be tender, as only love can make us tender. We must be fierce, as only love can make us fierce.
A man wrote to me once, “I don’t think that the woman I am with can give me anything—what I am is what I allow myself to be when I am with her, or any one else for that matter. If we rely on externals for our power, strength, and influence, then we are powerless.”
And since when is a woman’s love an external? Did my friend learn this frightful delusion in a seminar somewhere, a factory for warmed-over platitudes that slightly honor human psychology, yet pay mere lip service to the power of true love? How weak we are when we are not yet ready to let love rip us open. Is this thought—that a woman’s love cannot transform a man, that a man’s love cannot transform a woman—really to be heralded as some kind of wisdom? It is not wisdom. It is a poisonous emotional pesticide that kills the fruits of love. It is a denial of the deeper regions of the heart, a resistance to the experience of freedom, an anguished, “No, I cannot go” when someone has said, “Come with me now. My love is the key to your prison door.”
Such thinking, if not outgrown, is the deepest trap of all. It is not a repudiation of powerlessness, but a commitment to it. It is the cornerstone thought of a small and ultimately unlived life.
The miracle of love is expressed through other people. When a beloved is sent from God—and no one can tell you if they are, but the spirit within you—then they do hold the key to your soul’s liberation. God has given it to them. They contain, in every touch and sigh, the information you need, the miraculous power to alchemize your weaknesses and turn them into strengths, to dry your tears and turn them into genius, to release your chains and set you free to be your passionate self at last. Woe to the one who does not yet know enough to say a deep and robust “Yes” to such love, to bow before its truth, to be humble before its power, to surrender to the gales of wind that storm through lovestruck hearts.
How tragic it is when we are too arrogant to defer to love, to put all small considerations aside and say, “I am going there.” How stupid it is to say no to the power of God’s loving choice for us. How sad it is to think so little of ourselves that we cannot believe that he or she who stands before us, sent by God, is an angel come to give us wings. We have so little awe these days before the mysteries of the universe.
Yet if we are in the habit of denying God, then of course we deny His angels, too. And they hold, like pietas, the bodies of our unchosen loves. Angels weep—because their hearts are open—and I think God weeps as well to see such joy denied. And you continue to pray for what you’ve already received, and will one day realize that what you let fly by was a miracle intended to heal you. You might even say so, but by then it will probably be too late.
Angels do not light for long; they fly away when love denies them. They do not linger in the regions of earthly fear. Angels only come to pick up passengers, to fly away with them to paradise. Everything else is so ultimately silly, and everything else is so sad.
There is one more thing to know about the angel who came for you. The angel who came to fly you to paradise in reality had only one wing. She needed the angel in you to come forth, to be to her what she was willing to be to you. Thus your need for, your dance, your flight with each other. Together, you would have had one set of wings.
Next time she comes—whoever she is—perhaps you will not deny her. Next time she comes, be humble before God. Next time she comes, admit your pain. Next time she comes, come forth yourself. Next time she comes, let go your resistance.
Next time she comes, be brave.