Enchanted Love
Page 14
“Is that true?” I asked her. “Is there a sexual edge to it when you flirt with men in front of him?”
Once again, she said nothing.
“Melissa,” I said. “Do you want George to remain attracted to you?”
“Yes,” she replied.
“Do you want him to feel good about himself in your presence? Do you want him to find being with you exciting and fun? Do you want him to keep wanting you?”
“Yes.”
“Then, Melissa,” I said. “Cut it out.”
They both laughed, and they both looked relieved.
What Melissa was just learning was a very important key to intimacy: Some things you do for no other reason than that it makes another person feel good. I grew up in a generation so clueless on these subjects as to think thoughts like, “It’s not my responsibility to make you happy.” Now I think, “No, it’s not my responsibility—but it sure is a good idea!”
If George had been asking Melissa to compromise her own integrity, standards, or goals in life, then that would be a completely different story, of course. But there is a very big difference between substantial issues—which should never be compromised—and surface issues, our flexibility with which can make all the difference to another person’s happiness.
It’s a matter of deciding what you want. Both George and Melissa had already agreed that Melissa did not like to see other women hitting on George in her presence. I told Melissa that if she would make this change—if George saw her consciously and willingly refraining from touching other men in his presence—that I bet he would more than make up for any sacrifice she thought she had made for him, later that night. She knew, of course, and he knew, that I was right.
ANOTHER COUPLE told a story with similar implications. His name is Brian, hers is Suzanne.
“I had a free airline ticket to anywhere in the country,” he said, “but only a thirty-day window to use it. My wife couldn’t get off from work during that time, and she agreed I should go somewhere.
“So where I wanted to go was to Hawaii. She said that was the one place she didn’t want me to go, because she thought it was so romantic and she had always wanted us to go there together.
“I couldn’t understand why I shouldn’t go there now, and then we’d go there again, together, at a later time. I promised her we would. But she kept saying that it really hurt her feelings that I would go there. I thought that made no sense, so I went there anyway. Now I’m back, but I can feel the energy between us isn’t the same.”
I asked Suzanne how she saw the situation. She said that Brian’s version of the story was correct. It really hurt her that he didn’t honor her feelings about this, however irrational they might have seemed to him.
I understood Suzanne’s point. I told Brian that a woman’s feelings aren’t necessarily rational; they’re just feelings. But there’s little more exciting energy in the universe than the energy of a woman when she is truly happy. This wasn’t about who is right—there is no right here. What there is, is a question: Is your partner just your friend, someone walking through life on a parallel track, or is your partner someone with whom you are connected in an ever more intricately woven tapestry of mutual giving, sharing, and delight? The only reason for Brian not to have gone to Hawaii on this trip would have been in order to reap the highest possible emotional advantages from his marriage. Hawaii has external blessings, to be sure, but he chose to risk some internal blessings by going there at this time. He missed an opportunity that he might, given another, more romantic perspective, have jumped at: the chance to make his wife happy.
A few moments passed. Then Brian looked at Suzanne and said, “I’m sorry.”
The whole room melted. I even saw a few tears.
BRIAN IS A MAN who is learning to cherish a woman’s feelings. Just as important is that a woman learn to respect a man’s thoughts.
“My problem is my husband,” Kate said.
That alone—the expression, “My problem is my husband”—said a lot.
“He’s a wonderful man, and a wonderful father to our three-year-old little boy. I love my husband very much. But he has become an agnostic. He used to be very religious and then he started reading all about other religions and metaphysics and all, and now he says he doesn’t know what he believes.”
She stopped speaking.
“Forgive me,” I said. “I don’t see the problem.”
“Well it’s about my little boy,” she continued. “I’m so worried what effect this will have on him, that his father doesn’t know whether he believes in God or not!”
I said to her, “If you’re interested in your son’s psychological and spiritual development, then the best thing you can do is teach him to respect his father. That very much includes his father’s intellectual journey. Your husband is undertaking a difficult but courageous task; he’s actually thinking for himself. You should be proud of that and respect it. It’s the journey of his mind, and this particular kind of questioning is part of the journey of his generation.
“To show respect for your husband’s thoughts, particularly when they’re so obviously serious, is the greatest gift you can give to yourself, your marriage, your husband and your son. You don’t have to agree with someone’s intellectual conclusion to respect the journey that led them to it. Notice the insidious ways that the ego mind will always tempt us to judge another person, particularly those we love the most, and try to use that love as justification for our judgment.
“The problem as you describe it is not about God. It’s about respecting a man, and teaching his children to respect him, too. And that, in fact, is about God.”
She got it. In fact, they both sent me flowers. . . .
SO THE ISSUE of intimacy is one issue only: Relationship means joining, and joining is not of the body—joining is of the spirit. Every problem in the world, from war to domestic violence, is a result of hearts being separate. Anytime, anywhere, when two hearts join, the world is brought a little closer to heaven. But hell is embedded in our thought system here. Even in our most intimate relationships, we’re invested in finding guilt, and often we use sex as a means of closing the emotional gap that the guilt produced. We are learning now that the only level of true healing is the level of the heart.
When sex is merely a substitute for communication, or even worse, an expression of anger, then of course it heals nothing. When it deepens conversation, because words alone cannot possibly express the feelings that maybe, just maybe, my hand caressing your face could express, then the body is being used to serve something higher than the body. Love itself, not the body itself, is the healer of all things.
It does bear noting, of course, that knowing this only makes sex better. The body then takes us beyond the body, and becomes a door to a realm that the body can’t even enter.
Dear God,
I have lost my love.
I feel as though my heart is broken
and will never repair.
Please help me, God,
get over this.
Reveal to me the truth,
and show me
a love that never dies.
Amen
12
When Form Changes
A friend of mine used to e-mail me almost every day. One morning I received an e-mail from him that read, “Same message: eternally grateful we ended up in the same town at the same time.”
There was another e-mail he sent that day, but it was fairly mundane. I didn’t even remember what it was.
Hours after he wrote those notes, having flown across the country, my friend dropped dead of a heart attack. We never had a chance to say good-bye.
Later that day I said to my secretary, “Please print out those last e-mails from Andrew. I want to save them now.”
That night, I had a dream. In it, the phone rang and I answered it casually. “It’s Andrew,” said the voice at the other end of the line. I saw him sitting in a chair, speaking into the phone.
I was totally freaked by this dream. I awoke suddenly from my sleep, sat up quickly in bed, and cried out “Oh my God . . .!” I felt absolutely that I had been contacted by the dead.
The next day, or perhaps the day after, I was sitting at my desk, speaking on the phone and thumbing through files. I saw the one marked “Andrew’s last e-mails” that my secretary had prepared. Opening it, I saw his two last notes to me: the second one, written hours before his death—the one I had thought said nothing important—read, “Wherever I am tonight, I’ll try to call you.”
WHEN RELATIONSHIPS are “over,” they’re not really over. The body is just an encasement for the spirit of love, and whether bodies come or go—even whether they are physically alive or not—is not what determines the existence of love, its substantiality or its eternal significance.
All things that exist in truth exist forever. Birth doesn’t begin our existence and death doesn’t end it. And the same holds true for relationships. Whom God hath brought together cannot be torn assunder, not really. Once we’ve bonded with someone in the spirit of true love, then we can relax and just know that this love is ours forever. Your beloved can move to China, divorce you and marry someone else, or even say he or she hates you, but the real truth stays true for all time. What is love is eternal. No one’s opinion or momentary emotions can change this. Relationships last forever, and love can never die.
If you’ve still got healing to do with someone, then it might take five days or it might take five thousand years, but you will be coming together again for the chance to make that happen. Otherwise the will of God will not be done, and the will of God cannot not happen. The union of souls is the will of God, and the entire universe is invested in His plan. Anytime there’s conflict between anyone, for any reason, the harmony of God’s universe is disrupted. Divine spirit is like an ubiquitous, all-powerful bio-computer, leading everyone to the people and circumstances that provide the maximal opportunities to learn the lessons of love and forgiveness. That is the overriding drama of life on earth. We will someday be rejoined—all of us with all of us—and the rapture of that reunion will light up the world.
Anytime two hearts join, anytime any of us reach beyond the walls that separate us, the entire world moves closer to heaven. One link in a broken chain has been restored, and the formerly disconnected links are even stronger than before. The chain of the Atonement links all of us together and to God.
Disconnection between us can be so painful. The struggle most lovers live through, on some level, is the harmonizing between our soul purpose, i.e. our desire to connect, and our earth purpose, i.e. our need to individuate. Finding a way to integrate the two is the basic challenge of a spiritually mature love.
Many of us have loved people whose sense of relationship was more fluid, less form-based, more “Let’s not define it, let’s just see what it is” than ours. Other times, we’re the voice that sounds more like that, compared to someone else! We’re living at a time when old thought forms often do not apply, and we are struggling to find the perfect balance between freedom and responsibility. Creating the right vessel for love can be a challenge, indeed: Where are we allowing form to smother our love, and where are we using form to merely give it structure, making it more meaningful in the physical world? Too much focus on form, and the love itself—the needs of the people themselves—can seem left out of the equation. But if all we do is embrace a free-form love, valuing freedom and independence over responsibilities and commitments, then it’s as though we’re just embracing the wind. The answer here is to hold form, but to hold it lightly, like a very simple frame around a beautiful picture.
Somewhere there is a golden mean, where yes, we are free, and yes, we have earthly responsibilities as well. Yes, you get to feel whatever you feel for whomever you feel it for, and yes, there are principles of integrity here that matter as well, and promises, and people who have a right to feel that your word means something very meaningful and substantial. If all someone’s love means is “I feel for you, and that will never change,” then great, but that we can get from a dead person! We took on bodies for a reason. Love is not something to merely feel. It is something to be chosen, to make a stand for, to lay claim to, to incarnate fully. Otherwise there is a waste on some level of our precious time on earth.
Boundaries in love are like building codes in construction. They’re a pain to adhere to sometimes, but without them, things can get dangerous later on. And when integrity and righteousness are adhered to and demanded, then they do not kill love but rather lift it to a higher place. We don’t ever have to worry that a psychologically more sound existence will destroy the romance of life; at the highest level, spiritual and psychological truth are one. They need each other, for each, if unbalanced by the other, can deteriorate into half-truths. They are the yin and yang of all relationships, including intimate ones. Yes, I want to love you at night, but I also want to like you during the day. Yes, I want to fly through the sky with you, but I also want to stroll with you down Main Street. A grown-up at love knows how to do both, and doesn’t try to sacrifice one for the other.
I have felt before, “Oh, this is so disappointing. I’m starting to see what his real psychological issues are, and he’s starting to see mine. There goes the romance! So much for the ideal!” But in fact, that’s not when romance dies. It’s simply when illusions die. Disillusionment, after all, implies you were laboring under illusions in the first place! The moment that our real “issues” are exposed is simply when two people have the opportunity to go deeper, to explore further, to heal faster, to communicate more sincerely, to be more honest, and to love more truly. Yes, for a few minutes it will seem as though someone turned the music off and blew out the candles, but if the partners hold to the highest pursuit of both integrity and forgiveness at this moment of truth, then the water will indeed be crossed, the music will come on again, the candles will be relit, and the romance will become even deeper and more passionate. But you will only get to find that out if you have the guts to stay the course. Otherwise, you just jump from pink to more pink, when you could have had an entire rainbow.
I don’t know what to do with this storm. Large gray clouds, cold winds, choppy waters in the ocean beneath this cliff—all of them fill my heart. I am standing in a long red dress and bonnet, peering across the horizon, and I am looking . . . for what? Is your ship even out there? Is it on the sea at all?
My mind lacks information, and in this state of indefinition and perplexity, I long for calm. I return to the house. I drink tea and then I close my eyes. I am supported by the knowledge that I know you love me, and the choppy sea is yours, not mine.
And then, of course, there are times when it is really over. Not spiritually, as we have already seen, but in the realm of this earthly existence. Yes, he will stay in your heart forever, and you will stay in his. But there will be no more midnight conversations, morning kisses, or children crawling into bed with you. One of you, or both of you, said “No” . . . and so it is.
Perhaps there was wisdom in that decision, and perhaps there was not. Either way, one or both of you will probably cry. Either the spirit of God led you on to better things, or the gift of this love was too great for someone invested in their limits to endure. It doesn’t matter, on a certain level. The grief is still the same.
And yet the grief itself has a way of honing us and shaping us. It softens us and humbles us. And then we are more prepared for love. There is no reason to grow bitter when love departs. No one wronged you so much as they might have wronged themselves. And I do believe the statement that nature abhors a vacuum. For every tear in anyone’s eye, there is someone out there to kiss it away.
Whether the path of life or the mystery of death has taken our true love from us, we learn something very important from the experience: God, and
God alone, never leaves. He was there, is there, and will always be there. He lifts us above the hellish darkness that can sink our hearts and rob us of our joy. Our emotions need not be battered by the winds of fate, for God himself would have us walk on water. He literally lifts our spirits, and we come to know that we are safe to love, we are safe to be vulnerable, and we are safe to surrender—not because the beloved will necessarily remain here always, but because we know we will be fine in the arms of God, even if he does not.
WE CAN’T MAKE CHOICES for another person. However clearly we might think we see the light of infinite possibility, if our beloved sees no possibility at all, then that is his or her choice. We need to let go of the physical habits we have associated with this love, that is true, but we never, ever have to let go of the love itself. It remains with us because it is part of God. It will be part of us until the day we die, and I assume it will be part of us forever after that.
To forgive a love is to let go the things of the body, and embrace fully the things of spirit. Spirit can never be diminished or sacrificed in any way. Every love is part of every other love, and every love builds on the love that came before. Love is a mighty trajectory, moving through our lives by divine design, appearing to be composed of separate loves, yet that is just illusion. Like stars in the distant sky appearing to twinkle on and off, it might seem that we are “in” a relationship, and at another time we are “out” of relationship, but such is just a silly story that has no meaning in heaven. We are always in love, for love is always in us. Different smiles and different faces mean nothing. There is only one love. There is only one love.
I set you up to leave, of course. I see that now. People used to say to me, “Don’t you think you deserve love?” But I couldn’t see how to relate to that question. Now I see that for every time that I have cut off love, someone has cut off their love from me. Not because God has punished me, but because I have punished myself. Guilt demands punishment, and subconsciously I felt guilty. I programmed you to punish me. I see that now, and I free us both. Thanks for playing your part so well. I wish for you, and I wish for me, a happier drama, a kinder end, and a sweeter ride than the one we put each other through.