A friend of mine used to e-mail me almost every day. One morning I received an e-mail from him that read, “Same message: eternally grateful we ended up in the same town at the same time.”
There was another e-mail he sent that day, but it was fairly mundane. I didn’t even remember what it was.
Hours after he wrote those notes, having flown across the country, my friend dropped dead of a heart attack. We never had a chance to say good-bye.
Later that day I said to my secretary, “Please print out those last e-mails from Andrew. I want to save them now.”
That night, I had a dream. In it, the phone rang and I answered it casually. “It’s Andrew,” said the voice at the other end of the line. I saw him sitting in a chair, speaking into the phone.
While his only words were “It’s Andrew,” I got the sense in the dream that he been given some kind of special permission to make this call to me.
I was totally freaked by this dream. I awoke suddenly from my sleep, sat up quickly in bed, and cried out “Oh my God . . .!” I felt absolutely that I had been contacted by the dead.
The next day, or perhaps the day after, I was sitting at my desk, speaking on the phone and thumbing through files. I saw the one marked “Andrew’s last e-mails” that my secretary had prepared. Opening it, I saw his two last notes to me: the second one, written hours before his death—the one I had thought said nothing important—read, “Wherever I am tonight, I’ll try to call you.”
WHEN RELATIONSHIPS are “over,” they’re not really over. The body is just an encasement for the spirit of love, and whether bodies come or go—even whether they are physically alive or not—is not what determines the existence of love, its substantiality or its eternal significance.
All things that exist in truth exist forever. Birth doesn’t begin our existence and death doesn’t end it. And the same holds true for relationships. Whom God hath brought together cannot be torn assunder, not really. Once we’ve bonded with someone in the spirit of true love, then we can relax and just know that this love is ours forever. Your beloved can move to China, divorce you and marry someone else, or even say he or she hates you, but the real truth stays true for all time. What is love is eternal. No one’s opinion or momentary emotions can change this. Relationships last forever, and love can never die.
If you’ve still got healing to do with someone, then it might take five days or it might take five thousand years, but you will be coming together again for the chance to make that happen. Otherwise the will of God will not be done, and the will of God cannot not happen. The union of souls is the will of God, and the entire universe is invested in His plan. Anytime there’s conflict between anyone, for any reason, the harmony of God’s universe is disrupted. Divine spirit is like an ubiquitous, all-powerful bio-computer, leading everyone to the people and circumstances that provide the maximal opportunities to learn the lessons of love and forgiveness. That is the overriding drama of life on earth. We will someday be rejoined—all of us with all of us—and the rapture of that reunion will light up the world.
Anytime two hearts join, anytime any of us reach beyond the walls that separate us, the entire world moves closer to heaven. One link in a broken chain has been restored, and the formerly disconnected links are even stronger than before. The chain of the Atonement links all of us together and to God.
Disconnection between us can be so painful. The struggle most lovers live through, on some level, is the harmonizing between our soul purpose, i.e. our desire to connect, and our earth purpose, i.e. our need to individuate. Finding a way to integrate the two is the basic challenge of a spiritually mature love.
Many of us have loved people whose sense of relationship was more fluid, less form-based, more “Let’s not define it, let’s just see what it is” than ours. Other times, we’re the voice that sounds more like that, compared to someone else! We’re living at a time when old thought forms often do not apply, and we are struggling to find the perfect balance between freedom and responsibility. Creating the right vessel for love can be a challenge, indeed: Where are we allowing form to smother our love, and where are we using form to merely give it structure, making it more meaningful in the physical world? Too much focus on form, and the love itself—the needs of the people themselves—can seem left out of the equation. But if all we do is embrace a free-form love, valuing freedom and independence over responsibilities and commitments, then it’s as though we’re just embracing the wind. The answer here is to hold form, but to hold it lightly, like a very simple frame around a beautiful picture.
Somewhere there is a golden mean, where yes, we are free, and yes, we have earthly responsibilities as well. Yes, you get to feel whatever you feel for whomever you feel it for, and yes, there are principles of integrity here that matter as well, and promises, and people who have a right to feel that your word means something very meaningful and substantial. If all someone’s love means is “I feel for you, and that will never change,” then great, but that we can get from a dead person! We took on bodies for a reason. Love is not something to merely feel. It is something to be chosen, to make a stand for, to lay claim to, to incarnate fully. Otherwise there is a waste on some level of our precious time on earth.
Boundaries in love are like building codes in construction. They’re a pain to adhere to sometimes, but without them, things can get dangerous later on. And when integrity and righteousness are adhered to and demanded, then they do not kill love but rather lift it to a higher place. We don’t ever have to worry that a psychologically more sound existence will destroy the romance of life; at the highest level, spiritual and psychological truth are one. They need each other, for each, if unbalanced by the other, can deteriorate into half-truths. They are the yin and yang of all relationships, including intimate ones. Yes, I want to love you at night, but I also want to like you during the day. Yes, I want to fly through the sky with you, but I also want to stroll with you down Main Street. A grown-up at love knows how to do both, and doesn’t try to sacrifice one for the other.
I have felt before, “Oh, this is so disappointing. I’m starting to see what his real psychological issues are, and he’s starting to see mine. There goes the romance! So much for the ideal!” But in fact, that’s not when romance dies. It’s simply when illusions die. Disillusionment, after all, implies you were laboring under illusions in the first place! The moment that our real “issues” are exposed is simply when two people have the opportunity to go deeper, to explore further, to heal faster, to communicate more sincerely, to be more honest, and to love more truly. Yes, for a few minutes it will seem as though someone turned the music off and blew out the candles, but if the partners hold to the highest pursuit of both integrity and forgiveness at this moment of truth, then the water will indeed be crossed, the music will come on again, the candles will be relit, and the romance will become even deeper and more passionate. But you will only get to find that out if you have the guts to stay the course. Otherwise, you just jump from pink to more pink, when you could have had an entire rainbow.
I don’t know what to do with this storm. Large gray clouds, cold winds, choppy waters in the ocean beneath this cliff—all of them fill my heart. I am standing in a long red dress and bonnet, peering across the horizon, and I am looking . . . for what? Is your ship even out there? Is it on the sea at all?
My mind lacks information, and in this state of indefinition and perplexity, I long for calm. I return to the house. I drink tea and then I close my eyes. I am supported by the knowledge that I know you love me, and the choppy sea is yours, not mine.
And then, of course, there are times when it is really over. Not spiritually, as we have already seen, but in the realm of this earthly existence. Yes, he will stay in your heart forever, and you will stay in his. But there will be no more midnight conversations, morning kisses, or children crawling into bed with you. One of you, or both of you, said “No” . . . and so it is.
Perhaps there was wisdom in that decision, and perhaps there was not. Either way, one or both of you will probably cry. Either the spirit of God led you on to better things, or the gift of this love was too great for someone invested in their limits to endure. It doesn’t matter, on a certain level. The grief is still the same.
And yet the grief itself has a way of honing us and shaping us. It softens us and humbles us. And then we are more prepared for love. There is no reason to grow bitter when love departs. No one wronged you so much as they might have wronged themselves. And I do believe the statement that nature abhors a vacuum. For every tear in anyone’s eye, there is someone out there to kiss it away.
Whether the path of life or the mystery of death has taken our true love from us, we learn something very important from the experience: God, and God alone, never leaves. He was there, is there, and will always be there. He lifts us above the hellish darkness that can sink our hearts and rob us of our joy. Our emotions need not be battered by the winds of fate, for God himself would have us walk on water. He literally lifts our spirits, and we come to know that we are safe to love, we are safe to be vulnerable, and we are safe to surrender—not because the beloved will necessarily remain here always, but because we know we will be fine in the arms of God, even if he does not.
WE CAN’T MAKE CHOICES for another person. However clearly we might think we see the light of infinite possibility, if our beloved sees no possibility at all, then that is his or her choice. We need to let go of the physical habits we have associated with this love, that is true, but we never, ever have to let go of the love itself. It remains with us because it is part of God. It will be part of us until the day we die, and I assume it will be part of us forever after that.
To forgive a love is to let go the things of the body, and embrace fully the things of spirit. Spirit can never be diminished or sacrificed in any way. Every love is part of every other love, and every love builds on the love that came before. Love is a mighty trajectory, moving through our lives by divine design, appearing to be composed of separate loves, yet that is just illusion. Like stars in the distant sky appearing to twinkle on and off, it might seem that we are “in” a relationship, and at another time we are “out” of relationship, but such is just a silly story that has no meaning in heaven. We are always in love, for love is always in us. Different smiles and different faces mean nothing. There is only one love. There is only one love.
I set you up to leave, of course. I see that now. People used to say to me, “Don’t you think you deserve love?” But I couldn’t see how to relate to that question. Now I see that for every time that I have cut off love, someone has cut off their love from me. Not because God has punished me, but because I have punished myself. Guilt demands punishment, and subconsciously I felt guilty. I programmed you to punish me. I see that now, and I free us both. Thanks for playing your part so well. I wish for you, and I wish for me, a happier drama, a kinder end, and a sweeter ride than the one we put each other through.
Someday, when all of this is over, we will laugh at this. And you will say, “Do you remember when you were so mad at me, when I wanted to take that trip with my friends?”
And I will say, “Yes, I remember that. I didn’t know it, of course, but I was totally invested in making you a monster, and I couldn’t think of any other way to do it.”
“You did quite well,” you will say to me.
“But hallelujah,” I will say to myself. “I don’t have to do that anymore—to you or to me or to anyone.”
WITH HALF of all American marriages ending in divorce, we desperately need to embrace a more sacred way of dealing with this experience. We need it for ourselves, and most importantly, we need it for our children.
Divorce is not necessarily a real end. It is a change, to be sure, and an end to one form of a relationship—but it need not be an end to what is most important. If you have children with someone, then they are your family. And that family remains. Most divorced people I know would want very much to find a way to have a friendly, loving relationship with their ex, if they only knew how. And those who do are so clearly blessed.
In my book Illuminata, I wrote a sacred “divorce ceremony” that prayerfully guides a couple to place their now-ending marriage in the hands of God. It blesses the bond that does not die and surrenders the one that does. God is asked to illumine the transition. What violence is wrought, in our hearts and in our children’s hearts, when there is no grace around something this painful and significant.
Whether or not we choose to participate in such a ceremony, the murmuring of our hearts can still secure the blessings of the Lord.
Dear God,
We place this marriage
and this divorce
in Your hands.
Heal our hearts, dear God,
and heal our children.
We release each other in love,
and we bless each other forever.
Help us to forgive the past,
to see the beauty and innocence
and each other.
We thank each other for the good times,
and forgive each other for everything else.
May nothing in the past
except its blessing
remain with either one of us.
We thank each other
for the many gifts,
and vow to hold them in our hearts forever.
In this moment,
may our relationship be reborn,
to serve this new season of our lives.
May the Holy Spirit
guide us and bless us.
Forgive us both,
dear God.
Amen.
And when our beloved has passed from physical existence, a chapter in our relationship with that person is over. But the book of life itself never ends. If our beloved dies, he or she will be as an angel on our shoulder. And if our hearts are open, we will feel their wings brush gently up against our neck, every time we turn around.
Dear God,
Please tie a golden cord,
one end to my beloved’s heart
and one end to mine.
With Your hand upon this cord, dear God,
please make our bond eternal.
May neither sickness nor pain,
conflict nor death,
defeat or take away our love.
Cement my heart
to the heart of my beloved,
forever and ever.
Amen.
If the person we love still lives, but has withdrawn his or her affection, then it is possible that cords of energy still connect us in unhealthy ways. At such a time, it is best to ask God to remove those cords, to even cauterize their ends, that we might be free of attachments that no longer serve. Through sex and longing and depth of emotion, we can find ourselves tied to places and situations no longer useful to our journey. Then it is time to cry, and to pray, and to deepen. Yet such moments help inform us of the nature of love, and thus the nature of life. We come to understand more deeply who we really are and why we came here. When we see that, we begin to smile again.