In a vast
universe which often seems sinister and unaware of us, we need the
presence and shelter of love to transfigure our loneliness. This cosmic
loneliness is the root of all inner loneliness. All of our life,
everything we do, think and feel is surrounded by nothingness. Hence, we
become afraid so easily. The fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart
say that all of human life stands under the shadow of nothingness, the umbra nihili.
Nevertheless, love is the sister of the soul. Love is the deepest
language and presence of soul. In and through the warmth and creativity
of love, the soul shelters us from the bleakness of that nothingness. We
cannot fill up our emptiness with objects, possessions or people. We
have to go deeper into that emptiness, then we will find beneath
nothingness the flame of love waiting to warm us.
No-one
can hurt you as deeply as the one you love. When you allow the Other
inside your life, you leave yourself open. Even after years together,
your affection and trust can be disappointed. Life is dangerously
unpredictable. People change, often quite dramatically and suddenly.
Bitterness and resentment quickly replace belonging and affection. Every
friendship travels at some time through the dark valley of despair.
This tests every aspect of your affection. You lose the attraction and
the magic. Your sense of each other darkens and your presence is sore.
If you can come through this time, it can purify your love; falsity and
need will fall away. It will bring you onto new ground where affection
can grow again.
Sometimes
a friendship turns, and the partners fix on each other at their points
of mutual negativity. When you meet only at the point of poverty between
you, it is as if you give birth to a ghost who would devour every shred
of your affection. Your essence is rifled. You become so helpless and
repetitive with each other. Here you need deep prayer, great vigilance
and care in order to redirect your souls. Love can hurt us deeply. We
need to take great care. The blade of nothingness cuts deeply. Others
want to love, to give themselves, but they have no energy. They carry
around in their hearts the corpses of past relationships, addicted to
hurt as confirmation of identity. Where a friendship recognizes itself
as a gift, it will remain open to its own ground of blessing.
When
you love, you open your life to an Other. All your barriers are down.
Your protective distances collapse. This person is given absolute
permission to come into the deepest temple of your spirit. Your presence
and life can become their ground. Since the body is in the soul, when
you let someone so near, you let them become part of you. In the sacred
kinship of real love two souls are twinned. The outer shell and contour
of identity becomes porous. You suffuse each other.
