Love's
Initiations (an excerpt)
Thomas Moore
We sometimes
talk about love lightly, not acknowledging how powerful and
lasting it can be. We always expect love to be healing and
whole, and then are astonished to find that it can create hollow
gaps and empty failures. Going through a divorce is often a
long and painful process that never truly ends. Often we
never know completely if we've done the right thing, and even if
we enjoy some peace of mind about the decision, memory and
attachment continue to persist, if only in dreams. People
are also tortured emotionally about love that was never
expressed. A woman cries whenever she thinks of her father
going into surgery the last time she saw him. She felt a
strong urge within herself to tell him that she loved him, even
though their relationship had been strained all her life, but she
held back, and then it was too late. Her remorse is bitter
and persistent. In his Symposium, his great book on the
nature of love, Plato called love the child of fullness and
emptiness. Each of these aspects somehow accompanies the
other.
Our love of
love and our high expectations that it will somehow make life
complete seem to be an integral part of the experience. Love
seems to promise that life's gaping wounds will close up and
heal. It makes little difference that in the past love has
shown itself to be painful and disturbing. There is
something self-renewing in love. Like the goddesses of
Greece, it is able to renew its virginity in a bath of
forgetfulness.
I suppose we
do learn some things about love each time we experience it.
In the failure of a relationship we resolve never to make the same
mistakes again. We get toughened to some extent and perhaps
become a little wiser. But love itself is eternally young
and always manifests some of the folly of youth. So, maybe
it is better not to become too jaded by love's sufferings and dead
ends, but rather to appreciate that emptiness is part of love's
heritage and therefore its very nature. It isn't necessary
to make strong efforts to avoid past mistakes or to learn how to
be clever about love. The advance we make after we have been
devastated by love may be to be able to enter it freely once
again, in spite of our suspicions, to draw ever closer to the
darkness and hollowness that are mysteriously necessary in love.
It may be
useful to consider love less as an aspect of relationship and more
as an event of the soul. This is the point of view taken in
ancient handbooks. There is no talk about making
relationships work, although there is celebration of friendship
and intimacy. The emphasis is on what love does for the
soul. does it bring broader vision? Does it initiate
the soul in some way? Does it carry the lover away from
earth to an awareness of divine things?
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