It's all about love

I have been thinking about love a lot lately. God's love, married love, friend's love, romantic love, love of the colleague, companion and stranger.

This morning as I read from my Spiritual Direction magazine I read a quote from Thomas Merton:

"Love is our true destiny,

We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone -

we find it with another.

We do not discover the secret of our lives merely by study 

and calculation in our own isolated meditations.

The meaning of our life is a secret that is to be revealed

to us in love, by the one we love....

We will never be fully real until we let ourselves fall in

love...

Love is the revelation of our deepest personal meaning,

value and identity."

                                      

Love and Living, edited by Naomi Burton Stone and Brother Patrick Hart; Mariner Books, 2002, pages 27 & 35.

This rings so true to me, but what hit home was "We will never be fully real until we let ourselves fall in love..."

In our society we assume falling in love is a romantic thing, something that happens when we find a person we want to spend our life with. 

I have found that as I have begun to love myself I am in love with more and more people. Being in love for me is simply loving another, a state of loving, wanting the best for another, seeing past their hurts, wounds and not so good traits and behaviours to the real person that they are. It is not romantic or sexual. It is not wanting to be constantly with a particular person. It is enjoying their company, supporting them in the things that are going on in their lives.

I see God's love is the sort of love we need for each other, unconditional and accepting of the other just as they are, without expectation that they will change. This does not mean that if they treat us badly we are to stay around to be abused...I work with too many abused women and children to suggest that. It also means we don't keep trying to make them into what we want them to be, for to do that gives them the message they are not good enough and they are a constant disappointment. 

In our society we continue to believe the Cinderella story, all our movies have elements of it, even our churches proclaim it unwittingly. Both men and women are sucked in by the lie that one person will satisfy all their needs. However, to think that one other human being can meet all our needs, rescue us from our mundane drudgery or our deep pain is very unhealthy. It is also idolatry, for we make our husband, wife or partner into a saviour or we make ourselves into their saviour if we even partially believe that.

In marriage, whether that be the official kind or where we commit to living together as a couple, we have a particular relationship. It has some exclusivity; sexual exclusivity is the norm, and personally I think non-negotiable, but there are other things that are vital for the relationship to work. That is a commitment to go through the good and bad together, to keep trying, to be adaptable and to communicate at the deepest level. But neither the exclusivity nor the commitment means we exclude friends who meet some of our emotional, intellectual, spiritual and social needs. To be unwilling for another person or group of people to meet one, any or parts of all of those needs in either ourselves or our intimate partner speaks more of our own fear, insecurity and lack of having our needs met healthily.

God made us for community knowing we cannot be healthy without others; we cannot grow or survive without others. So we must let go of our Cinderella stories, our happy ever after myths and be willing to share our selves with others in love, willing to share those we love with others, share our intimate partner with others knowing that we benefit from this as they benefit from it. 

May God bless us with many people to love and be loved by.