What Then Is Love?

Both these words do it for me. I read an article in the Irish Times during the week (I’ll post the date and writer) on sex trafficking in Ireland now. For some reason ( the most obvious - I’m a woman) the horror has taken the best part of a week to percolate. Words like suffering, justice, god and why, are part of my humanity. And part of my mysticism. I guess it slipped my mind, that if we live in heaven (as many of the mystics say…and that we just can’t see it), it’s true that we also live in hell. The question for me, beyond all other questions, is why should should one young girl be locked in a room and plundered while I can go off and play tennis? Where is the universe in that?
The psychoanalyst Eric Fromm wrote in ‘Psychanalysis and Zen Buddhism’ that life poses one question; “How can we overcome the suffering, the imprisonment, the shame which the experience of separation creates; how can we find union within ourselves, with our fellow man, with nature”.
There is of course a further question, still, (and Fromm would have be in on this) and that is how can do we overcome the suffering, the imprisonment, the shame which domination creates? Its the question of any self actualized, or ethical, or religious, or compassionate or imaginative person. I’m asking it on a Sunday morning, an bright, and very beautiful and quiet Sunday morning. I’m going off off to play tennis, to runaround after a ball, to play with (or is it against?) someone, to try to outwit them (and myself), to laugh and chat at the net about the BBQ last night, to shower and change and go about the sunny Sabbath. This is heaven. And still I know that there are prisons everywhere in the city, being manned and used by gangs of men for so what some might call sex (I don’t know what I call it), and this is as far as I can see is hell. So how come I get to be in heaven? What allowed that, enabled that, pushed that and why? Karma, evil, madness or exploitation, one way or another a mysticism without an investigation into imposed suffering isn’t gathering the full weight of life.

The spirituality of ending…
For some reason this is a pressing thought on my mind. How come we mark beginnings, mostly, and leave separations, goodbyes, adieus, to stand alone in our memory? I was somewhere at the weekend where a workshop was being run for those newly separated or divorced. I thought of all the preparations and rituals that preceeded the union of two people, the excitement, the open support, the general hulabaloo.
The centre where I was staying involved a workshop with people coming to a journey’s end. I spoke with many of my religious buddies, saying that I thought nowadays we need a spirituality which honours the sheer energy, dedication and work it takes to share a dream for any length of time with someone else. We all agreed.
So one of the courses I’d like to draw up would be a workshop on the spirituality of parting. A good rigorous workshop to help people realise the dignity of making plans, of trying to do one’s best, of holding on when forces are blowing facewards. Thats my idea for today. Lets celebrate the spirituality of trying…
Whatdayathink??

Following on my interview in The Irish Examiner for Valentine’s Day (see The Greatest Gift of All click image on the sidebar), I was delighted to be invited on both Seoige & O’Shea, RTE One TV and Spin 103.8 FM (radio). I’m hoping at some point to have the TV clip and if it’s not too huge, and if I get permission, to post it here.

Meanwhile, the nice people at Spin 103.8 FM (radio) have given me permission to use the interview here, so I’m trying my first podcast!

Here goes, with compliments to Spin 103 FM. It should play as soon as you click on the player.

If you’re into podcasts and want the feed address click on the following to Subscribe to ChristineClear.org RSS

Otherwise just click on the player below. (requires Macromedia Flash)

NB It may not be remixed or reproduced for profit. copyright Spin 103 FM, Dublin, Ireland. Podcast with permission.

Do you think a lone tiger crossing the frozen plains of the Antarctic is really just searching for love? Are the thousands of marathon joggers crossing a bridge in any one city really running towards the Ineffable? Is a mother pushing her daughter’s car to a wrenching start, and waving her on, honouring the basic laws of love, or basic laws of evolution?

What do we mean by love? Where is it? Who knows about it? And how can we find it? Is the search for love best undertaken by being alone under vast skies, or is it better taken in fellowship through common and rewarding purpose? What does love ask of us, and how does it work?

Valentine’s Day is approaching and our culture is going to spend a lot of sound-bites around this four-letter word. The love most likely to be presented will be a high-visibility love. A love which we can watch and discuss like the weather. To a stranger such talk might appear as colloquial and charming; how we talk of southerly winds of attraction, the balmy days of union, and the ensuing seasons of commitment etc. Yet, while our appreciation for this mellifluous forecast might be fleeting or praising, the stranger will see that for this one day in the year, the seduction of love, romantic love in all its capitalist prescriptions, is offered as the only real antidote to the cold pain of human existence.

“Without love, humanity would not last a day.” When Eric Fromm said this in 1957, it was loading a lot on the word then, but it now seems even more exacting given our ecological fragility and thus human vulnerability. And so, if Fromm’s statement is true, then why out of all the myriads of loves that we could explore, have we chosen to celebrate the entertaining kind, the cutesy/easy/sugary love? The love of puppies and cushions? And of beach balls?

Nearly all the good artists take love seriously, certainly the real poets, and unarguably almost all of the mystics. That was my reckoning at least when I first had this conversation with myself late one night on a motorway, heading west, alone and trying to work out the semantics of it all.

NO…I do not LOVE ice-cream, cars, houses, technology…
I LOVE FREEDOM.
And YES, I do not LOVE you because you LOVE me,
I LOVE you because I’ve learnt HOW to love you.

But, what is love? What does it mean? What does it want? I know that if love is the solution to the pain of existence, it is also a big part of that pain too. And as a motorway theologian I argue that if love is also pain ..and God is love …well, then, we’re into something…unsettling. Is God pain - the Cloud of Unknowing? And is embracing that darkness, as St. Teresa of Lisieux says, an act of love? The suffering of agape and the suffering of mystical union should be collapsed no doubt, but one thing remains, love and suffering is, as all the ancient romantic sagas tell us, a truism. Christ sang of it too, albeit from another perspective. For the mystic to step into love, either by choice or charm is for her/him to step outside of community, and like the lone tiger roaming blizzardy deserts, to be ultimately alone is to be often killingly lonely. For acts of salvation, one must proffer good measures of one’s life to keep the bigger picture going. Ordinarily, it is called evolution. One generation’s teeth and hair must fall out, for another generations to grow. But what if that proffering has no direct bearing on humanity? What if the search remains separate from the commonplace? Is that love? Does love imply a relation with both life and death, and does love ask that while a part of us is struggling to live, a part of us must also struggle to die?

Is that love?

Or is this an erroneous, misguided and masochistic delusion?

Is love not the drive into the eyeball of life, the demand and the answer of the spirit to live and to celebrate, and to cry out in praise of life; to dance, to drink, to laugh, to love ?

Freud said that civilization is “a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals and after that families, then races, peoples, and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind”. Is this the kind of love that has the spiritual bottle to receive life as gift and grace, to run with what has been given, to believe in what’s been done, to cherish what’s been offered, and to testify to it all by loving another?

Isn’t love believing in life?

Isn’t it the profound human wisdom of accepting the difference between you and I, and isn’t the strength and stature needed to hold that tension, ultimately - as Iris Murdoch has defined love - “the very difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” Allowing oneself to partake in the delight, drama and stamina it takes to look into another pair of eyes and not flinch, is surely the groove through which life itself flows - reproduction, celebration, creation, forgiveness and service. Are these not the fruits of love? The fruits of salvation, the gifts of the Lamb, offered to those capable of navigating the paradox between giving and receiving, between what is mine and yours, between what is now and not now. Surely this is love? Surely, it is love that we learn to love for love’s sake? For most, accepting we are not the centre of the universe is the one of the greatest gifts that love can offer, and so is the ensuing and enabling freedom it gives for real community and fellowship.

Isn’t that love? Aren’t we loving then?

Or is there still yet another love which creates life (even more life) through the stuff of love itself. A love which transforms life into art, ethics, beauty, justice, abundance? Through and by its own bearing in the world? Many of the parables of spiritual alchemy show how to transform one reality into another through the laws of love. That is, in itself, love.

Is love not the genius of the imagination in figuring how to cook raw materials so that they turn into something else? Or, as Mozart said: “neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go into the making of a genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.” So is love the only antidote to blandness, despair, violence, anger and ugliness? Is love the genius of creating an antidote to a problem? For example, Christ transforming a mob calling for an accused woman’s blood into a dignified crowd by their addressing their own conscience, is testimony to love’s efficacy.

Is it that that love asks?

I know the four letters of love are the deeply grooved conduits between us and our universe.

For the most part I think we are all just trying to reach love, like sailors navigating home. Visibility is moderate, and the correlation between capitalism and our own sense of self makes it often difficult to see. Is it possible in a consumerist culture to celebrate love when it doesn’t follow the laws of economics? We know that love, real love has a boomerang effect in the sense that the more I give away, the more I have. Is this why love in a consumerist economy is trivialized and sugared because as Gandhi wrote, only the truly courageous can love? Can we say that of love, or is that unloving?!