Obit for Love

In December of 2008 I met AJ in passing. He was at my parents’ home to give an informal talk and we hardly spoke a few words to each other. I didn’t really listen to much of his talk and after he left I didn’t give any of it much conscious thought but our meeting sparked some deeper process in me - an awakening of a deep spiritual longing that, in my desperate, decades-long, quest to numb my pain, I had also kept anesthetized.

A week after he left our home, I bought my first official journal. One morning I got up and opened it. This was the first entry I wrote. 

There is a feeling of disillusionment inside of me – the world is full of damaged souls – causing hurt and pain. Cynical and harsh no-one is prepared to believe in anything true and beautiful, these things must surely be trodden on, tainted and weak. The power of love seems lost – a fools belief in the face of hatred and hardship.

I mourn the loss of Love, the death of beauty and hope.

I have shut it down, closed it off, left it outside in the cold to suffer and struggle.

Love – I’m sorry I left you – abandoned you.

Can I welcome you back in? Am I strong enough to support you? To believe in you in such dark, dark days? Can truth and beauty really touch all of the ugliness?

Or are we destined to carry on without you? To leave you to suffer and starve – as we carry on using vices and strife to grapple with life?

Should we become hard with a bitter taste in our mouth – striking out in anger, taking power in order to survive?

And as we struggle and fight to take our place in the world – in our corner that we have claimed – tell me who will warm that corner that we huddle in? As we shiver together – our families, our clans, our gangs – in the tiny spaces we have taken with iron fists and fear – then will we miss you?

Will we remember Love left outside in the cold and damp?

Love – we will miss her then and say SHE has forsaken US. Why doesn’t she come? We will miss her warmth and beauty and wonder why she left us – how could she be so cruel?

And so you see the world will end – tiny groups of tortured souls, huddling in darkened corners, feeding off fears and victim hood.

No-one will remember Love.

She will die and so will we all. We will descend into eternal blackness – screaming with pain, dried up with sorrow, skin tight on our bones, our teeth sharpened by years of bitter struggle and anger.

And it will all have been for nothing.

Simply we aren’t strong enough to stand for Love. WE have left HER – forsaken HER. We have seen her as weakness – to be avoided and laughed upon as a silly child’s thing, a trick of the light, pathetic and simple, to be scorned and left to die alone.

Am I the only one who remembers Love? Me, who has shut her out and treated her so unkindly. Do I have the courage to open the door? – For I know she waits just outside, cold and alone and crying for all of the madness she sees.

In fact I want to go to her outside – and cry. I see what she mourns. The crazy fucked-up world so lost that it believes it is ‘found’. All of the humanity so arrogant to think it can ‘go it alone’ without Love. Humankind, that to exist amidst the madness, has itself gone insane.

I want to grieve with Love, to join her outside and cry an ocean of regret and disillusionment.

We can sit by the door,

on the step,

in the wind and rain

and feel forsaken together.

For the only alternative is to ask her in – to give her tea in the sitting room and be willing to stand for her, to ask her to warm my heart, to ask for strength to face the insanity, to heal the pain and then to be regarded as insane myself.

I don’t feel strong enough – to face the darkness –

Will Love be there to take my hand? Can I trust her? Will she forgive me for leaving her, laughing at her? Can she really warm the shady corners of the world – where vultures circle and victims hold themselves together in packs ready to fight threats and murder?

How can the world change?

I want to sit with Love on the cold front step and mourn the death of Love.

In the past four years I've learned that in order to open to love again I have to be brave enough to feel all of the sharp and painful parts inside of me that are hurt and disillusioned about life, relationships and the world that we live in.  

So this week on the blog is a journey of reflection on love. 

One of my biggest fears is still opening to and trusting love again. There is a huge dam of grief inside that the healing warmth of love threatens to burst open. So I'm writing on a mission - to foster courage and trust in this process.

Join me if you desire. 

If you write a blog and want to share your reflections on love in response to each post, link your url in the comments section. Or if you just want to share reflections in the comments, you are most welcome here friend.

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Arvarna mentioned this song to me a long time ago. Its so haunting and beautiful. Sometimes I hunger for love, other times my heart trembles at the thought, this song always moves me.

How To Hold a Dream

We live in a culture that regularly scorns innocence, passion and vulnerability. All too often we ‘water down’ our true selves in favour of a version of self that suits the cynical and image-focussed landscape in which we live. We are taught to view the preciousness of our childhood dreams and creativity as childish, as too idealistic and unrealistic. [1]

I was taught early that my extremely emotional and expressive self was befuddling and bemusing to my parents. I learnt to be ashamed of this part of myself.

My huge desire to make the world a better place, to extend love to others and change lives for the better, I relegated to an idealistic pipe dream after spending ten years working in our health system and over two years in the Middle East. I came to believe that to be worldly was to face the harsh facts that the world is irretrievably messed-up, that lasting change and peace is a naïve concept. I learnt to judge and be angry instead of grieve the suffering I saw everywhere I went.

When Yeshua began work on the constitution for God’s Way of Love Organisation and as we began to talk about our future vision I had to face how much disillusionment I still carry about the way our world works and how resolute I feel so many of us still are in our decision to deny God and love, to judge our childlike selves and to stifle our creativity in favour of ‘fitting in’.

It seems that to truly embody this vision of ours I must have the courage to grieve my feelings of hopelessness, my belief that the world can’t change. This conviction of mine comes not only from my experiences in the past 30 years but has its roots in a time when a great dream was lost, when Light living in one man was extinguished through murder and a group of people grieved deeply that the presence of God’s Love on earth was so brief. It lived on only in a few of us, and to a much lesser degree. Our devastation was complete and my loss threatened my will to live, my faith and my hope. It broke my heart in a way that now it seems cleaved in two. The wound is covered over by scar tissue and yet underneath is still raw and weeping and excruciating to touch.

To make way for hope and creativity, I must grieve my loss and I must also cease to regard my childlike self in the way that my parents and environment taught me to. We learn to treat ourselves harshly and with reserve to avoid the pain of our wonder, excitement and imagination being stifled and judged by others. We reject ourselves so that we do not feel the grief of how rejected we were by others in our innocent state.

Our tears will free the sparkling children, full of wonder, big ideas and dreams, who are still waiting there within us. We can all learn to be trusting children again – only this time we can come to rely on a God of Love who accepts us as we are and delights in our childlike inventiveness and wonder.

When I consider God’s Way of Love as a vehicle for me (and all of us) to reconnect to this state; as a place that will welcome our tears at past dreams dashed, and teach us to hope again with vulnerable hearts no longer afraid of loss, I am moved beyond words.

I quietly tremble and let my heart release its fear. I allow the tears of my past Great Loss.

In order to hold our dream in my heart I must repair my faith and trust once again in the power, patience and endurance of Love. I must let my tears flow and allow their tracks to create pathways, passageways that may deepen and lead me back to my excitement, spontaneity and creativity.

May the passage of all our tears teach us the wisdom of letting go of expectations and control. May it rebuild in us strong roads of faith, faith in the unfailing strength our Father and the unending generosity of our Mother.

May God bless the beautiful child within you today,

Mary

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[1] Emily writes cool stuff about this here & here