You know what I see in you? Not only the weakened, but also the strong. Not only the wounded, but also the healed. Not only the old, but also the new. Enter with me into a dazzling present, to be with me, now, who we have never allowed ourselves to be before.
New water pours over us, as we surrender to the wave. We will wash ourselves clean of the yesterdays that stick to us. This is not death. We are not drowning.
Forget with me, my darling. Forget with me what never was.
A FRIEND OF MINE e-mailed me to say he was in love. This was it. This was the real one, the maddeningly rapturous, complete and total experience of love he’d been waiting for his entire life.
Several months later, I was speaking to him and asked him how his love affair was doing.
“I’m still in there,” he said. “But it’s hard. It’s bringing up all my issues.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like tolerance. Anger. Enmeshment. Judgment. My mother.”
“Wow,” I said. “That certainly sounds like a lot of fun.”
“I have gotten totally in touch with how I responded to my mother’s attempted suicide when I was four years old,” he said. “I decided back then that I would take care of her, no matter what, so she wouldn’t leave me. And now, when someone abandons me or doesn’t act the way I think they should, I just die. I used to attack people when they did that, because I would go into denial over it and pretend it wasn’t happening, but now I know I need to get in touch with my feelings no matter what, but even when I get in touch with the feelings, then I have to not attack or judge because otherwise I’ll just turn the other person off and then they’ll leave me all over again and that’s my mother.”
“How fun!” I said. “And your girlfriend? What is she like?”
“She’s intense. She’s powerful. She’s angry. She’s selfish. She’s narcissistic. But she’s really doing the work. I have never seen anybody do the work the way she’s doing. She’s looking deep into issues that I’m only just beginning to question. It’s amazing. All of her incest and abandonment issues are right in her face. She’s in therapy and looking at these things, and I understand it makes her totally self-absorbed to be dealing so deep with those issues right now, but I get jealous because I want more of her attention and then that brings up all my abandonment issues. We fight on an average of once a week. She doesn’t take any of my shit. But it’s tiring after a while. I really don’t know how long this ride is gonna last.”
“So! . . .” I exclaimed, exhausted from merely hearing the story. “Have you seen any good movies lately?”
Hearing my friend tell the story of his love affair, I had my own thoughts about what issues were being brought to the fore. To me, they were in some ways different from his. I don’t minimize the need for psychological work, but as necessary as it can be, purely analytical understanding is not the ultimate meaning of intimacy. In fact, I think we should avoid the temptation to pathologize relationships so much. It can tempt us to insidiously avoid the real experience of love.
At the heart of love lies an irreducible mystery. To demystify love is to lose it. Its mystery provides its vital power to enchant us, to touch us, and to heal us. In far too many relationships, the mystery is squeezed out of love. Plans, form, analysis, definition—they can all be used to block love’s spiritual outpour. Mystery is fragile and demands our protection. We must surrender ourselves to a higher drama if we would drink of the divine.
Beyond the mortal mind is the realm of immortal spirit, with a different story to tell from the hysterical drama that we call life. I heard a different story from the one my friend was relaying, as he told me of his relationship. It was the story of a generation with a desperate need to apply spiritual principles to our romantic pursuits. Truths such as forgiveness; learning to live in the moment; knowing that we right the wrongs of the past through right, compassionate living in the present; respecting the mystery that brings us together; listening to the wisdom of the heart; not hiding behind psychological analysis; seeking God’s grace; creating emotional safety for ourselves and for each other; avoiding the temptation to judge and find fault; cradling the broken other in our arms; and pouring on support and approval, in an effort to bless and heal us both.
I warn you: this will not be easy. I warn you: this will take some work. I warn you: love will burn you up. Are you ready to be burned, or would you rather just grow old?
Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, “Hell is other people.”
And so is heaven.
Relationships can be hell. Someone isn’t getting enough time or attention, someone else isn’t getting enough freedom or space. Someone’s controlling; someone else is withholding. Someone’s crying and trying to get in; someone else is sighing and trying to get out. Over and over, we are emotionally bombarded. Often we wonder, “Why do I bother?”
Yet every once in a while, there is a burst of starlight: a minute, an hour, perhaps a day or year or even much longer, when love is perfect. We are truly seen by someone and that someone loves what he or she sees. The very air becomes a moving sidewalk as we stride from one right moment to another, completing each other’s sentences, holding each other’s dreams. Our very molecules seem to know each other. In that one moment, or on that one day, we finally feel not alone on this earth after all.
But then reality sets in, or actually, nonreality sets in. Love is the ultimate, God-created, unchangeable reality in the universe, but the world we have made for ourselves does not acknowledge or reflect that. With our free will, we have established an alien mental kingdom ruled not by love but by thoughts of fear. Love does not feel at home in the world of fear, and that is because it is not. Lasting love can be very hard to achieve on this plane, running as it does so counter to the grain of the emotional status quo. The ways of love can feel almost unnatural. We have manufactured for ourselves, in this illusionary world, a kind of ersatz love. It is based more on tolerance than on real acceptance, more on form than on content, and more on the joining of bodies than on the joining of spirits. And as long we keep things shallow, as long as there is no run for the mountaintop experience of love, then these relationships have a fairly good chance of surviving.
But if you dare to say, “No, I want more,” then you are confronting the ego and demanding the joy that is your natural birthright as a child of God. If you have the courage to stand up and consciously declare that the limits to love in this world do not work for you, that you choose to experience the lifting of the veil while you are still alive, then you have taken on the forces of fear.
And fear will answer you. “Fine,” it will say. “Love deeply, if you want to. See if I care. But watch that wall of fire in front of you, and on your left and on your right. It will consume you, of course. But by all means, go ahead and try to walk right through.”
That fire does consume, but grace bestows upon us a titanium personality structure invincible enough to withstand the heat. Two souls genuinely combining spiritual forces generate—quite literally—the power of God. That power is reflected in the material world. Both nuclear fusion and nuclear fission are physical reflections of the extraordinary potential for both destructiveness and creativity, when two units of life either separate or merge. Relationships can be powerfully bad, and they can be powerfully good, but they cannot be powerless.
Love can be a huge mountain, a gentle garden, a raging storm, a cool breeze, or a perfect bath. But there is always fire somewhere nearby. There is always the red-hot stuff of the soul’s initiation. If there isn’t fire, then it isn’t love. It might be a marriage that lasts forever. It might have all the signs of what the world calls a “successful relationship.” But if it doesn’t insist that you move to your next level, if it doesn’t take your heart and make it explode in a million pieces, only to fall back together again in some moment of enlightened understanding, then you haven’t really loved. You’ve done the bourgeois thing perhaps, but let’s not call that love.
Any time there is a chance for deep love, there is standing in front of that love a wall of fire. That fire might take the form of something burning within you—an inner condition—or it might take the form of an outer circumstance. But there is never love without fire. To the mystic, the presence of that fire does not say, “Go away.” To the mystic, the presence of that fire says, “Here, if you are strong enough to take it, is love.”
Chaka Khan sang a song years ago, in which she proclaimed that she was willing to “go through the fire” for her man. The truth is, it is that fire which molds us. The fire is not the danger of the relationship, but its greatest gift. It does not burn up the essential self, but rather it burns up everything else. When a wall of fire stands in front of you, but one you truly love is on the other side of it, then reaching through the fire for your beloved’s hand will make you a magical being who can walk through fire without getting burned. At that point, we take on another frequency of consciousness. When we can do that, we can do most anything.
The world gives prizes for many things. There’s a prize for the best everything that anyone can imagine. But the only prize for the artist at love is the thrill of knowing you’ve made it through that fire to the other side. There is no worldly prize that can match the thrill of this accomplishment, and the smile it brings to two people’s faces.
The thrill of knowing that that fire is behind you, that the metal in your heart is now turned to gold, makes of a relationship a sacred chalice. Humanity’s romantic energies are ready for that chalice; we have the water, we just haven’t had the cup. A civilization that doesn’t acknowledge the sacred in any meaningful, practical way, but rather leaves it in a completely dry and sexless context, has no guidebook for sacred romance. It doesn’t see the divine in most anything truly human, so how could it see the divine in the most human thing in the world?
We will bathe in magic water and we will allow the sun to dry our skin. We will close our eyes and take in new light. We will listen to the whispering counsel of angels.
We will look at each other with the eyes of the new. We will honor each other with the crown of the sky. We will touch each other with the touch of the earth. And love will be our medicine. God will smile, and we will smile, and the world itself will become more glad.
Come with me. I want to show you love.
The biggest block to love is the human personality. I drove up to my daughter’s school one day, and I saw a little girl, around age five, talking to a little boy. Talking isn’t the right word, really. It was a perfect flow of energy between these two little people. She was open, smiling, flirting before she could even know what the word means. And he was a little cocky, just eating it up. Another twenty years, and—barring some dramatic shift—the world will surely have done its thing to these two children. The same conversation will be laden with emotional issues.
I stared longingly for a moment. That little girl was so unguarded and yet so safe. She had nothing to fear here because fear had not occurred to her yet, or to him. She was completely vulnerable, completely undefended, completely adoring, and completely herself. I felt jealous. Each of us carries a little girl or little boy like that inside ourselves, like a remembrance of our lost innocence. We want to be that free, but who has the guts anymore? We want to be that adoring, but who has the skill? We want to be that innocent, but we can’t remember how.
I was reminded of a painting I saw once at a museum in New York City. A young man and woman are running naked through the woods in some mythical setting. They both have perfect, sensual bodies, yet there is no sense of sexual prowess or shame. They have the smiles of angels. I stood for a long time before that painting, wondering, “Does that really exist? Did it ever? Is it just an ideal? Can we love as adults, yet reclaim the trust of a child? Can we be this, and also that? Can we live in this world, and in Eden simultaneously?”
Perhaps we can, if we try. If we let fall into the sea what is ready to fall, then ground that is new will arise to the surface. Paradise exists. It is merely submerged.
I used to pray to You because I was lonely,
but then You came to me and I was lonely no more.
Then I prayed to You to make me better,
and You came to me and healed my heart.
Now I ask You, dear God,
for a glorious mission.
May I contribute to the life of another
in the deepest way,
the most holy way,
the most loving way,
that together we might serve You more.
May I help a beloved
grow closer to You,
may a beloved help me
grow closer to You.
May I delight in my partner,
and my partner delight in me,
that Your light which unites us
might light up the world.
Thank you, God.
Amen
Now that you have said that prayer, you might wish to prepare your inner room. Write down on a piece of paper the characteristics of your personality that you most want transformed by the Holy Spirit. Own these things, take responsibility for your defects, and then surrender them to God. Ultimately, all work is inner work.
Now you might wish to look around your house. Is it a place where your love would find comfort? Are the items here for his or her delight? Is there an area of your existence that would keep love away? Deal with these things now, for his or her footsteps are near.
Be patient and be calm. For the hour is nigh, for all of us.
And I am all fitted now, in a gown of light. My sisters and I have dancing shoes, and we dance most every night. Musicians play, and we sing our songs, and breathe life into the words. Our little sisters come and join us as we prepare the otherworld.
Know you that we wait for you? We do. We do.
And are you prepared to dance?
AND THEN, he comes. People had said you might meet him in this way or that, but when the day arrived, he just appeared. Funny. He’s not who you would have thought capable of snatching your heart from your chest.
Love is simpler than it appears, in this complicated world of ours. The secret of love is to tell the beloved how wonderful he or she is, constantly and sincerely, at least a million times every day. Give and then give some more and then give a little more than that. To the extent that love has dried up in my life, it was always because I became miserly with my expression of affection. To the extent that love has blossomed in my life, it was always because I expanded my willingness to express the love that often cowers like a child in a corner of my heart. I have learned that everyone has that corner, and the childlike place where we cower within it. When we honestly speak from that place in ourselves, we encounter that place in someone else, and then two frightened children become two courageous adults, with a very adult capacity to love and to be loved.