All About Love

by bell hooks

  When I was a little girl, our mother talked with ease about the possibility of death. Often, when we would put off for tomorrow the things that could be done today, she would remind us that “life is not promised.” This was her way of urging us to live life to the fullest—to live so that we would be without regret. I am continually surprised when friends, and strangers, act as though any talk of death is a sign of pessimism or morbidity. Death is among us. To see it always and only as a negative subject is to lose sight of its power to enhance every moment.

  Luckily, those healers and comforters who work with the dying show us how to face the reality of death, so that talking about it is not taboo. Just as we are often unable to speak about our need to love and be loved because we fear our words would be interpreted as signs of weakness or failure, so are we rarely able to share our thoughts about death and dying. No wonder then that we are collectively unable to confront the significance of grief. Just as the dying are often carted off so that the process of dying will be witnessed by only a select few, grieving individuals are encouraged to let themselves go only in private, in appropriate settings away from the rest of us. Sustained grief is particularly disturbing in a culture that offers a quick fix for any pain. Sometimes it amazes me to know intuitively that the grieving are all around us yet we do not see any overt signs of their anguished spirits. We are taught to feel shame about grief that lingers. Like a stain on our clothes, it marks us as flawed, imperfect. To cling to grief, to desire its expression, is to be out of sync with modern life, where the hip do not get bogged down in mourning.

  Love knows no shame. To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending. The way we grieve is informed by whether we know love. Since loving lets us let go of so much fear, it also guides our grief. When we lose someone we love, we can grieve without shame. Given that commitment is an important aspect of love, we who love know we must sustain ties in life and death. Our mourning, our letting ourselves grieve over the loss of loved ones is an expression of our commitment, a form of communication and communion. Knowing this and possessing the courage to claim our grief as an expression of love’s passion does not make the process simple in a culture that would deny us the emotional alchemy of grief. Much of our cultural suspicion of intense grief is rooted in the fear that the unleashing of such passion will overtake us and keep us from life. However, this fear is usually misguided. In its deepest sense, grief is a burning of the heart, an intense heat that gives us solace and release. When we deny the full expression of our grief, it lays like a weight on our hearts, causing emotional pain and physical ailments. Grief is most often unrelenting when individuals are not reconciled to the reality of loss.

  Love invites us to grieve for the dead as ritual of mourning and as celebration. As we speak our hearts in mourning we share our intimate knowledge of the dead, of who they were and how they lived. We honor their presence by naming the legacies they leave us. We need not contain grief when we use it as a means to intensify our love for the dead and dying, for those who remain alive.

  Toward the end of her brilliant career, Kübler-Ross was convinced that there really is no death, only a leaving of the body to take another form. Like those who believe in an afterlife, resurrection, or reincarnation, death becomes, then, not an end, but a new beginning. These insights, however enlightening, do not change the fact that in death we surrender our embodied life on earth. Love is the only force that allows us to hold one another close beyond the grave. That is why knowing how to love each other is also a way of knowing how to die. When the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning declares in her sonnet “I shall but love thee better after death,” she attests to the importance of memory and communion with our dead.

  When we allow our dead to be forgotten, we fall prey to the notion that the end of embodied life corresponds to the death of the spirit. In biblical scripture the divine voice declares “I have set before you life and death, therefore choose life.” Embracing the spirit that lives beyond the body is one way to choose life. We embrace that spirit through rituals of remembering, through ceremonies wherein we invoke the spirit presence of our dead, and through ordinary rituals in everyday life where we keep the spirit of those we have lost close. Sometimes we invoke the dead by allowing wisdom they have shared to guide our present actions. Or we invoke through reenacting one of their habits of being. And the grief that may never leave us even as we do not allow it to overwhelm us is also a way to give homage to our dead, to hold them.

  In a culture like ours, where few of us seek to know perfect love, grief is often overshadowed by regret. We regret things left unsaid, things left unreconciled. Now and then when I find myself forgetting to celebrate life, unmindful of the way embracing death can heighten and enhance the way I interact with the world, I take time to think about whether I would be at peace knowing that I left someone without saying what’s in my heart, that I left with harsh words. I try daily to learn to leave folks as though we might never be meeting again. This practice makes us change how we talk and interact. It is a way to live consciously.

  The only way to live that life where, as Edith Piaf sings, we “regret nothing” is by awakening to an awareness of the value of right livelihood and right action. Understanding that death is always with us can serve as the faithful reminder that the time to do what we feel called to do is always now and not in some distant and unimagined future. Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh teaches in Our Appointment with Life that we find our true selves by living fully in the present: “To return to the present is to be in contact with life. Life can be found only in the present moment, because ‘the past no longer is’ and ‘the future has not yet come’. . . . Our appointment with life is in the present moment. The place of our appointment is right here, in this very place.” Living in a culture that is always encouraging us to plan for the future, it is no easy task to develop the capacity “to be here now.”

  When we live fully in the present, when we acknowledge that death is always with us and not just there at the moment when we breathe our last breath, we are not devastated by events over which we have no control—losing a job, rejection by someone we hoped to connect with, the loss of a longtime friend or companion. Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us “everything we seek can only be found in the present” that “to abandon the present in order to look for things in the future is to throw away the substance and hold onto the shadow.” To be here now does not mean that we do not make plans but that we learn to give the making of future plans only a small amount of energy. And once future plans are made, we release our attachment to them. Sometimes it helps to write down our plans for the future and put them away, out of sight and out of mind.

  Accepting death with love means we embrace the reality of the unexpected, of experiences over which we have no control. Love empowers us to surrender. We do not need to have endless anxiety and worry about whether we will fulfill our goals or plans. Death is always there to remind us that our plans are transitory. By learning to love, we learn to accept change. Without change, we cannot grow. Our will to grow in spirit and truth is how we stand before life and death, ready to choose life.

  Twelve

  Healing: Redemptive Love

  We have been brought into the inner wine cellar and sealed with His seal, which is to suffer out of love. The ardor of this love greatly outweighs any suffering we may undergo, for suffering comes to an end, but love is forever.

  —TESSA BIELECKI

  LOVE HEALS. WHEN we are wounded in the place where we would know love, it is difficult to imagine that love really has the power to change everything. No matter what has happened in our past, when we open our hearts to love we can live as if born again, not forgetting the past but seeing it in a new way, letting it live inside us in a new way. We go forward with the fresh insight that the past can no longer hurt us. Or if our past was one in which we were loved, we know that no matter the occasional presence of suffering in our lives we will return always to re
membered calm and bliss. Mindful remembering lets us put the broken bits and pieces of our hearts together again. This is the way healing begins.

  Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands. In his collection of essays The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin writes about suffering in the healing process, stating: “I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering—but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.” Growing up is, at heart, the process of learning to take responsibility for whatever happens in your life. To choose growth is to embrace a love that heals.

  The healing power of mind and heart is always present because we have the capacity to renew our spirits endlessly, to restore the soul. I am always particularly grateful to meet people who do not feel their childhoods were marked by unnecessary pain and suffering, by lovelessness. Their presence reminds me that we do not need to undergo anything dreadful to feel deeply, that we never need suffering to be imposed upon us by acts of violence and abuse. At times we will all be confronted with suffering, an unexpected illness, a loss. That pain will come whether we choose it or not and not one of us can escape it. The presence of pain in our lives is not an indicator of dysfunction. Not all families are dysfunctional. And while it has been crucial for collective self-recovery that we have exposed and continue to expose dysfunction, it is equally important to revel in and celebrate its absence.

  Unless we can all imagine a world in which the family is not dysfunctional but is instead a place where love abounds, we doom family life to be always and only a site of woundedness. In functional families individuals face conflict, contradictions, times of unhappiness, and suffering just like dysfunctional families do; the difference lies in how these issues are confronted and resolved, in how everyone copes in moments of crisis. Healthy families resolve conflict without coercion, shaming, or violence. When we collectively move our culture in the direction of love, we may see these loving families represented more in the mass media. They will become more visible in all walks of daily life. Hopefully, we will then listen to these stories with the same intensity that we have when we listen to narratives of violent pain and abuse. When this happens, the visible happiness of functional families will become part of our collective consciousness.

  In The Family: A Revolutionary Way of Self-Discovery, John Bradshaw offers this definition: “A functional healthy family is one in which all the members are fully functional and all the relationships between the members are fully functional. As human beings, all family members have available to them the use of all their human power. They use these powers to cooperate, individuate and to get their collective and individual needs met. A functional family is the healthy soil out of which individuals can become mature human beings.” In the functional family self-esteem is learned and there is a balance between autonomy and dependency.

  Long before the terms “functional” and “dysfunctional” were used to identify types of families, those of us who were wounded in childhood knew it because we were in pain. And that pain did not go away even when we left home. More than our pain, our self-destructive, self-betraying behavior trapped us in the traumas of childhood. We were unable to find solace or release. We could not choose healing because we were not sure we could ever mend, that the broken bits and pieces could ever be put together again. We comforted ourselves by acting out. But this comfort did not last. It was usually followed by depression and overwhelming grief. We longed to be rescued because we did not know how to save ourselves. More often than not we became addicted to living dangerously. Clinging to this addiction made it impossible for us to be well in our souls. As with all other addiction, letting go and choosing wellness was our only way of rescue and recovery.

  In many ways I have acted out throughout much of my life. When I began to walk on the path of love, I was awed by how quickly previous dysfunctions were changed. In the church of my girlhood we were always told no one could give an individual salvation, that we had to choose it for ourselves. We had to want to be saved. In Toni Cade Bambara’s novel The Salt Eaters, wise older women who are healers are called in to assist the young woman who has attempted suicide, and they tell her: “Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, ’cause wholeness is no trifling matter—a lot of weight when you are well.” Making the primal choice to be saved does not mean we do not need support and help with problems and difficulties. It is simply that the initial gesture of taking responsibility for our well-being, wherein we confess to our brokenness, our woundedness, and open ourselves to salvation, must be made by the individual. This act of opening the heart enables us to receive the healing offered us by those who care.

  ALTHOUGH WE ALL want to know love, we talk about the search for true love as though it is always and only a solitary quest. I am disturbed by the weighty emphasis on self in so much New Age writing on the topic, and in our culture as a whole. When I would talk about my yearning for a loving partner, people told me over and over that I did not need anyone else. They would say I did not need a companion and/or a circle of loved ones to feel complete, that I should be complete inside myself. While it is definitely true that inner contentedness and a sense of fulfillment can be there whether or not we commune in love with others, it is equally meaningful to give voice to that longing for communion. Life without communion in love with others would be less fulfilling no matter the extent of one’s self-love.

  All over the world people live in intimate daily contact with one another. They wash together, eat and sleep together, face challenges together, share joy and sorrow. The rugged individual who relies on no one else is a figure who can only exist in a culture of domination where a privileged few use more of the world’s resources than the many who must daily do without. Worship of individualism has in part led us to the unhealthy culture of narcissism that is so all pervasive in our society.

  Western travelers journey to the poorest countries and are astounded by the level of communion between people who, though not materially rich, have full hearts. It is no accident that so many of the spiritual teachers we gravitate to in our affluent society, which is driven by the ethos of rugged individualism, come from cultures that value interdependency and working for a collective good over independence and individual gain.

  While terms like “codependency,” which came out of programs for individual self-recovery, rightly show the ways in which excessive dependency can be unhealthy, especially when it is marked by the support of addictive behavior, we still need to talk about healthy interdependency. No organization dedicated to healing demonstrates this principle more than Alcoholics Anonymous. The millions of people who attend AA meetings seek a place of recovery and find that the affirming community that surrounds them creates an environment of healing. This community offers to individuals, some for the first time ever in their lives, a taste of that acceptance, care, knowledge, and responsibility that is love in action. Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.

  Most of us find that space of healing communion with like-minded souls. Other individuals recover themselves in their communion with divine spirit. Saint Teresa of Avila found, in her union with the divine, recognition, comfort, and solace. She wrote: “There is no need to go to heaven in order to speak with one’s Eternal Father or find delight in Him. Nor is there any need to shout. However softly we speak, He is near enough to hear us. . . . All one need do is go into solitude and look at Him within oneself, and not turn away from so good a Guest but with great humility speak to Him . . .” Prayer provides a space where talking cures. It is no doubt a sign of the spiritual crisis of our times that books are written to provide proof that prayer is soothing for the soul. All religious traditions acknowledge that there is comfort in reaching for the sacred through words, whether traditional liturgy, prayer, or chants. I pray daily as a gesture
of spiritual vigilance. Prayer is an exercise that strengthens the soul’s power. Reaching for the divine always reminds me of the limitations of human thought and will. Stretching, reaching toward that which is limitless and without boundaries is an exercise that strengthens my faith and empowers my soul.

  Prayer allows each person a private place of confession. There is truth in the axiom “confession is good for the soul.” It allows us to bear witness to our own trespasses, to those ways we miss the mark (a definition of the meaning of sinfulness). It is only as we recognize and confront the circumstances of our spiritual forgetfulness that we assume accountability. In their work The Raft Is Not the Shore, Daniel Berrigan and Thich Nhat Hanh stress that “the bridge of illusion must be destroyed before a real bridge can be constructed.” In communion with divine spirit we can claim the space of accountability and renew our commitment to that transformation of spirit that opens the heart and prepares us to love.

  After we have made the choice to be healed in love, faith that transformation will come gives us the peace of mind and heart that is necessary when the soul seeks revolution. It is difficult to wait. No doubt that is why biblical scriptures urge the seeker to learn how to wait, for waiting renews our strength. When we surrender to the “wait” we allow changes to emerge within us without anticipation or struggle. When we do this we are stepping out, on faith. In Buddhist terms this practice of surrender, of letting go, makes it possible for us to enter a space of compassion where we can feel sympathy for ourselves and others. That compassion awakens us to the healing power of service.