Have you ever stopped to ask yourself what kind of life you are surviving? Have you thought about the kind of journey I am asking you to take with me? Would you really rather stay here in the land of the dying and call it life?
No, no, no, you just found me at a low point. I had best go back to where I knew what to do. Thanks for saving me, but now that I’m saved, I think that I had best go back.
And so I did, and now I look for you, but all I can find are your eyes in the sky, on certain days, under certain conditions, and while they do not reproach me, they seem to miss me as much as I miss you.
Now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Goddess rises up to resurrect the deadened soul of modern consciousness. Romance is one of her wombs, as breathing life into a destroyed beloved is very much her specialty. There is an eternal temple dance, a romantic ballet deux of hearts, where day after day, night after night, in every corner of the world, Osiris longs to receive new life and Isis longs to give it. In the middle of war, in the midst of suffering, on our marriage beds and even on our deathbeds, we reach for each other and say, “I love you so much.”
This is so much more than sex on vacation, a night to remember, or a power struggle between romantic partners. Sacred romance is a call of the soul, a bid for life in spite of it all. It is nothing less than an assignment from God. “I have chosen someone to heal you,” He says, “and I have chosen someone for you to heal. Enter the temple and expose your wounds. Be not afraid. My spirit will heal both of you. Together you shall receive new life.”
Come down, you said, to the river with me. I want to bathe you in what I know.
And then you will never cry again. You will see where your dreams are only dreams, and we will visit together the land of the awake. I will give you a diamond to wear on your heart, and it will shine in you forever. I will give you a kiss that will stay in your mouth, and the more you speak, the more it will bless.
You will be a goddess then. For thousands of years they will proclaim your name. Throughout the ages, they will know of you that you lifted me up when I was dead, and thought my death an unalterable state. You breathed new life into my mind, for only you were sane enough to think that such was possible. In return I gave my heart to you, and behold, we both now live.
From this point forward there is a new horizon. If any man or any woman ever sink below the line, if they cannot breathe or they cannot reach, they will only have to call our names. And the power of our love will reach to them. We will lift them up and make them one, as you and I are one this night. Cleave to me, as I cleave to you. Together we will glue together the broken pieces of the errant world. Forever we will live like this.
Forever we will live. . . .
Dear God,
May the man I am with
emerge into his greatness.
May the woman I am with
emerge into her glory and her joy.
May we leave behind
our broken selves,
and emerge into the light.
Heal our wounds
and bless our dreams.
Thank you, God.
Amen
4
Sharing Our Gifts
My darling, go home and tell your mother that you are coming with me. Tell her she needs to pack for you, for where we are going it can get quite cold.
Now go and be swift, for we must not tarry. The hour is late, and our dreams are waiting.
I hold your dreams very close to my heart, and I hope that you hold mine.
THE MORTAL MIND focuses on the physical; divine mind focuses on the spiritual. The mortal mind believes in limits; divine mind believes in limitlessness. The mortal mind believes in guilt and error; divine mind believes in forgiveness and innocence. Which mind we choose to think with literally makes the difference between relationship heaven and relationship hell.
The mortal mind asks, “What am I getting here?” Divine mind asks, “What am I giving here?” The mortal mind says, “Why isn’t the relationship this or that?” Divine mind asks, “What is the gift here? What is the meaning of this love?” The mortal mind says, “So-and-so did this wrong, or that wrong.” Divine mind says, “I desire to focus on the light in others, that I might experience the light in myself.”
Believing in finite resources, the mortal mind guides us to selfish thought and selfish behavior. This in turn destroys relationships.
In fact, it is divine mind which illumines our path to true intimacy, guiding us to the thoughts and feelings and perceptions that genuinely join our hearts to the hearts of others. For one thing, it makes us givers and not takers, and we only get to keep what we give away. Love guides us toward the spiritual and emotional generosity without which there is no true depth of connection, mystical or otherwise.
I WAS WORKING once with a group of teenagers, all of us sitting together in a small circle. I led an exercise in which we were to go around the group, each sharing our deepest dreams. Then, after each person had shared his or her dream, everyone else in the circle was to actively support it. At the beginning of the exercise, it went like this: Michael said that his deepest dream was to be a great artist. I then asked Shelly to support that dream, and she looked not at Michael but at me, and said, “Yeah, I think Michael could be a great artist. He draws real well.”
I said, “No, Shelly, look right at Michael. Look into his eyes. Speak to him in first person. Tell him if you think he has talent, and tell him you think he will be a great artist someday.”
“Michael,” she said, looking at him but still averting her eyes, “I think you’re a real good artist. I think you’ll be one, one day.”
“Not quite enough, Shelly,” I said. “It’s your job to convince him. Helping someone feel confident is part of holding their dream.”
“Michael,” she said, “I am absolutely sure that you will be a great artist someday. Your pictures are fantastic. I love them. One day the entire world will love them.”
“Much better, Shelly,” I said. “But life is hard, and he probably still needs a little more encouragement. Why should he believe you?”
“Believe what I’m telling you, Michael,” she said, now looking into his eyes as though the knack had been there all along. “Because I know what I know. I know this is true.”
“Shelly,” I said. “Where is Michael’s dream?”
“It’s in his heart,” she said, looking at me.
“Where else is his dream now, Shelly?” I asked her. “Is it anywhere else?”
“I guess it’s in my heart,” she said.
“Then tell him that.”
“I’m holding your dream in my heart, Michael.” Her smile was ageless now, and she held his gaze.
“Tell him it will be safe there, Shelly.”
“It will be safe there. I will keep it for you,” she said. “You don’t have to worry. I’m your friend and I’m holding your dream.”
I looked over at Michael and he was crying. I almost cried too, thinking how much pain I went through before I knew how to hold a man’s dreams.
YET IT’S HARD to show up for someone else when you don’t yet know how to show up for yourself. How can you give of yourself when you don’t really think you’re anything worth giving? How can you extend your light when you don’t really believe there is any in you? But the light in us is the light of God, and it’s there because He put it there. Lack of self-esteem is more arrogant than it is humble, suggesting the idea that God somehow created junk.
Low self-esteem is delusional. We’re all one in spirit, and thus we are deeply equal in essence. It is our spiritual essence and equality, not our differences, that form the basis for true self-esteem as well as regard for others. We all just happen to be hosts to God. So what’s not to love?
What this means, among other things, is that all of us have a lot to give. In fact, we have not yet begun to scratch the surface of our infinite potential. All of us are faucets through which divine waters would flow forth freely. And
God’s gifts would not only pour into us every moment but would also pour through us, seeking to cleanse and nourish the entire world. We block that flow when we think that we personally have nothing to give. It’s the water, not the faucet, that ultimately matters. In any moment that our desire and willingness is to be of service to another, the faucet is miraculously turned on. If our prayer is, “Dear God, please use me to be of service,” then that is what we will be. And it is not for us to judge either the size or value of our gifts. Our job is to try to get out of the way, to defer to the spirit moving within us and become open channels for the flow of God’s love. That is what Jesus meant when he told us to become like little children: There is an innocence and grace that naturally and automatically pull all things into harmony and balance. Finding that place, through prayerfulness and meditation and constant practice, delivers us to an energy more peaceful, more illumined, than the ego mind can even conceive of. That energy lives by its own dictates, and would have us do the same. We are literally guided by its light, effortlessly, to higher and higher paths of unfoldment. When we step back and let a higher power lead us, what emerges are plans and schemes that far surpass the little ideas of our mortal minds.
A man once said to me, “But what would a day with us look like?” I could not answer him in a way that could satisfy his then-current frame of reference. What love does, if it is allowed to, is to combine people’s energies in ways that lift their lives to a mode of divine right order, where new ideas, new possibilities, and new opportunities for growth emanate directly from the heart of God.
Our job is to not abort the process.
I was having lunch one day with a very successful friend who was visiting my town. I said, “What are you doing tonight?” He said, “Nada,” with a tone that implied, “I’d love to do something!”
“Well,” I said. “There’s a woman speaking on relationships tonight over at the church. She’s really good. Do you want to come?”
“Great!” he said.
About an hour later, I had seen more of his life. It is a very big life on external levels. As the day wore on, I began to lose faith in the adequacy of my gift to him.
Finally I said to him, “You know, I don’t mean to disinvite you, but I really don’t know if you would like this talk. I’m not sure. . . . I mean, I don’t know. . . . Although, I could have someone pick you up, of course. . . . I couldn’t take you, but someone else could pick you up, and you could leave when you want to, and I mean, well, I would have you sit next to me, but then you could leave. . . .”
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
He of course opted for dinner and a movie with his friends, and I went to the lecture at the church. The entire talk related to the very issues that my friend was dealing with in his life. It would have delighted him. I had denied him the gifts that were trying to find him, by diminishing my own.
The next night I saw him and said, “I should have kidnapped you last night and taken you to that talk.”
“I know,” he said. “I could feel that.”
I learned something from that experience. My temporary lack of self-esteem in relation to the grand level of my friend’s existence had blocked the truth from me: that all gifts are equally significant, because they have nothing to do with the material world. I do not serve the world by false humility. I serve the world most by humbly accepting that God uses me, because God uses everyone and everything to serve the process of universal healing. We are constantly offered the gifts we most need to receive. The way to receive our gifts is to give our gifts, and that we cannot do if we are always questioning their value.
There is an overall scheme of perfection in the universe, and thinking we are somehow not part of its design only interferes with its unfoldment.
THE CHALLENGE of our generation is to move from me to we. That is the maturity we assume when we wish to learn to love each other from a healed and holy place. Narcissistic people are lonely.
Narcissistic people misunderstand independence, often mistaking the commitment to aloneness for psychological health. A woman I know once told me she was deeply touched by a man she had just met, who lived in another town. While they hadn’t known each other for long, she felt in her heart that something very special had occurred between them, a romantic magic that was very rare in both their lives.
Seeing her a couple of weeks later, I asked her how her relationship was going. “Well, it’s not,” she told me. “I mean, after all, I just met him. I think he’s fabulous, and we lift each other up into some incredible place. But I can’t go making major life decisions based on that.”
I hesitated. “Whoa,” I said. “I could have sworn we could. Should we base life decisions on something less important?”
She gave me the following excuses for why she couldn’t be with this man: one, he lived in another town (as though there aren’t airplanes); two, another man might be moving to be with her in this one (although she said she wasn’t in love with him); and three, she didn’t know if she could be with this new love and still pursue her career. What I kept thinking, as I listened to her, was that this was a woman who was unwilling to reach for love.
She was like someone waking up in the morning and on her bed is a breakfast tray, the morning paper, a good book, a telephone, and a remote for the TV. It’s all there. She’ll reach over for something to do, at some point, when she happens to be in the mood to do so.
So romance with this man was simply that for her: something else lying around, like a newspaper or a book that she might pick up sometime. She might reach over, but she had no plans to reach for. Neither her society nor her life experience had taught her that love is infinitely more important than either a breakfast tray, telephone, newspaper, book, or TV. Her heart told her it was—I could tell that from the way she described her feelings—but modern culture had told her, if anything, how neurotic her heart was to want to jump at this, how much more important a career is than passionate love, and how serious and adult it is to honor material considerations over the love we feel inside. She hadn’t yet considered that the voice of the heart is the voice for God.
She hesitantly asked me what I thought.
“I’m not sure you want to know,” I responded.
“But I really do want to know—sort of,” she laughed.
I paused, and then I said, “I think you’re dishonoring yourself. Jobs, houses, money, and even sex come and go, but love is like some magical bird. And once it flies away you have absolutely no power over if or when it will ever return.”
“It surprises me to hear you say that,” she said softly. “You’re a career woman. You obviously put your career first.”
“Boy, is that not true,” I said. “It might look that way to you, but I think that if I put my career first in the way you mean that, it wouldn’t be much of one. When my heart talks, I try to listen. Why should I validate my heart in every other area, but not relationships? I don’t think there’s any less importance in loving a man than in loving anything else. Relationships are certainly part of God’s plan! And everything in life is better when we have love in our lives.”
I had been like that woman once, thinking romance and God lived in different corners of the universe. Yet it was all just an insidious effort of my mind to keep my relationships out of God’s hands.
I thought my romantic longings deserved less respect than my longing for professional achievement. Many women of my age grew up with the twisted idea that men and babies should be secondary goals. What’s true love and the miracle of giving birth, next to the awesome high of delivering your first quarterly report?
That’s how dumb we were.
We were taught to go after things that we could control. Love, of course, drives you, and not the other way around. Most of us, both men and women, are terrified of merging our hearts with another. We say we’re not, but we are. Even when we’re in relationships, we avoid their mystical power. We turn lovers into roommates, butlers, or maids. We avo
id the real light at the center of romantic passion. We’re afraid it would swallow us up.
And that’s because it would, and it does! Overwhelming our sense of separateness is in fact love’s spiritual purpose. The alchemy of love turns the small into the infinite. Enchanted romance is a fire meant to burn up our sense of otherness, from other people and from God Himself. So many of us went around saying for years, “I lose myself in other people too much. I need to stay out of relationships.” And often that was true. But after a period of time, that thought just became a rationalization for the avoidance of love. The day came, once we had developed ourselves and knew who we were, when many of us were only too happy to give up the trappings of our separateness. To resist intimacy, out of fear that if you love you will risk codependency or enmeshment, is like resisting eating food out of fear of obesity. That, as we know, is not wisdom but severe dysfunction. At a certain point, once you’ve established your separate identity, it’s imperative that you let yourself lose it again. Otherwise, you can never know love.
Dear God,
I feel that if I love this person,
I could lose everything that I have.
I have no idea where this love might take me,
and in his presence,
I don’t even care.
Is it strength, or weakness,
to have faith in this feeling?
Illumine my mind and heart,
dear God,
for my ship is lost at sea.
Amen
A career, you can control. Love, you can’t. Terrifying news that, but wonderful once you get the hang of it.
The reason intimacy is so important is that it does force us to surrender our sense of separateness, not in a neurotic way but in an enlightened way. I understand why women had to completely renegotiate our terms of partnership, after centuries of institutionalized subjugation, but at a certain point we have to show up enough to at least give men a chance to do it right. Both men and women are trying very hard today to rethink, redefine, and recast romantic partnership.
Enchanted Love Page 4