All About Love

by bell hooks

  Love in action is always about service, what we do to enhance spiritual growth. A focus on individual reflection, contemplation, and therapeutic dialogue is vital to healing. But it is not the only way to recover ourselves. Serving others is as fruitful a path to the heart as any other therapeutic practice. To truly serve, we must always empty the ego so that space can exist for us to recognize the needs of others and be capable of fulfilling them. The greater our compassion the more aware we are of ways to extend ourselves to others that make healing possible.

  To know compassion fully is to engage in a process of forgiveness and recognition that enables us to release all the baggage we carry that serves as a barrier to healing. Compassion opens the way for individuals to feel empathy for others without judgment. Judging others increases our alienation. When we judge we are less able to forgive. The absence of forgiveness keeps us mired in shame. Often, our spirits have been broken again and again through rituals of disregard in which we were shamed by others or shamed ourselves. Shame breaks and weakens us, keeping us away from the wholeness healing offers. When we practice forgiveness, we let go of shame. Embedded in our shame is always a sense of being unworthy. It separates. Compassion and forgiveness reconnect us.

  Forgiveness not only enables us to overcome estrangement, it intensifies our capacity for affirming one another. Without conscious forgiveness there can be no genuine reconciliation. Making amends both to ourselves and to others is the gift compassion and forgiveness offers us. It is a process of emptying out wherein we let go all the waste so that there is a clear place within where we can see the other as ourself. Casarjian explains in Forgiveness: “Even small acts of forgiveness always have significant ramifications at a personal level. Even small acts of forgiveness contribute to one’s sense of trust in oneself and the potential of others; they contribute to a human spirit that is fundamentally hopeful and optimistic rather than pessimistic or defeated; they contribute to knowing oneself and others as potentially powerful people who can choose to lovingly create, versus seeing humans as basically selfish, destructive and sinners.”

  When we have clarity of mind and heart we are able to know delight, to engage the sensual world around us with a pleasure that is immediate and profound. In his essay “Down at the Cross,” James Baldwin declares: “To be sensual . . . is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.” Poet Adrienne Rich cautions against the loss of the sensual in What Is Found There? Notebooks on Poetry and Politics: “Sensual vitality is essential to the struggle for life. It’s as simple—and as threatened—as that.” Estrangement from the realm of the senses is a direct product of overindulgence, of acquiring too much. This is why living simply is a crucial part of healing. As we begin to simplify, to let the clutter go, whether it is the clutter of desire or the actual material clutter and incessant busyness that fills every space, we recover our capacity to be sensual. When the asleep body, numb and deadened to the world of the senses, awakens, it is a resurrection that reveals to us that love is stronger than death.

  LOVE REDEEMS. DESPITE all the lovelessness that surrounds us, nothing has been able to block our longing for love, the intensity of our yearning. The understanding that love redeems appears to be a resilient aspect of the heart’s knowledge. The healing power of redemptive love lures us and calls us toward the possibility of healing. We cannot account for the presence of the heart’s knowledge. Like all great mysteries, we are all mysteriously called to love no matter the conditions of our lives, the degree of our depravity or despair. The persistence of this call gives us reason to hope. Without hope, we cannot return to love. Breaking our sense of isolation and opening up the window of opportunity, hope provides us with a reason to go forward. It is a practice of positive thinking. Being positive, living in a permanent state of hopefulness, renews the spirit. Renewing our faith in love’s promise, hope is our covenant.

  I began thinking and writing about love when I heard cynicism instead of hope in the voices of young and old. Cynicism is the greatest barrier to love. It is rooted in doubt and despair. Fear intensifies our doubt. It paralyzes. Faith and hope allow us to let fear go. Fear stands in the way of love. When we take to heart the biblical insistence that “there is no fear in love,” we understand the necessity of choosing courageous thought and action. This scripture encourages us to find comfort in knowing that “perfect love casts our fear.” This is our reminder that even if fear exists it can be released by the experience of perfect love. The alchemy of perfect love is such that it offers to us all a love that is able to vanquish fear. That which is rendered separate or strange through fear is made whole through perfect love. It is this perfect love that is redemptive—that can, like the intense heat of alchemical fire, burn away impurities and leave the soul free.

  Significantly, we are told in biblical scripture that it is crucial that love casts out fear “because fear hath torment.” These words speak directly to the presence of anguish in our lives when we are driven by fear. The practice of loving is the healing force that brings sustained peace. It is the practice of love that transforms. As one gives and receives love, fear is let go. As we live the understanding that “there is no fear in love” our anguish diminishes and we garner the strength to enter more deeply into love’s paradise. When we are able to accept that giving ourselves over to love completely restores the soul, we are made perfect in love.

  The transformative power of love is not fully embraced in our society because we often wrongly believe that torment and anguish are our “natural” condition. This assumption seems to be affirmed by the ongoing tragedy that prevails in modern society. In a world anguished by rampant destruction, fear prevails. When we love, we no longer allow our hearts to be held captive by fear. The desire to be powerful is rooted in the intensity of fear. Power gives us the illusion of having triumphed over fear, over our need for love.

  To return to love, to know perfect love, we surrender the will to power. It is this revelation that makes the scriptures on perfect love so prophetic and revolutionary for our times. We cannot know love if we remain unable to surrender our attachment to power, if any feeling of vulnerability strikes terror in our hearts. Lovelessness torments.

  As our cultural awareness of the ways we are seduced away from love, away from the knowledge that love heals gains recognition, our anguish intensifies. But so does our yearning. The space of our lack is also the space of possibility. As we yearn, we make ourselves ready to receive the love that is coming to us, as gift, as promise, as earthly paradise.

  Thirteen

  Destiny: When Angels Speak of Love

  Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone—we find it with another.

  —THOMAS MERTON

  BELIEVING IN DIVINE love comforted me as a child when I felt overwhelmed by loneliness and sorrow. The solace of knowing I could speak my heart to God and the angels made me feel less alone. They were there with me during anguished and terrifying dark nights of the soul when no one understood. They were there with me, listening to my tears and my heartache. I could not see them but I knew they were there. I heard them whispering to me about love’s promise, letting me know all would be well with my soul, speaking to my heart in a divinely sweet secret language.

  Angels bear witness. They are the guardian spirits who watch, protect, and guide us throughout our lives. Sometimes they take a human form. At other times they are pure spirit—unseen, unimaginable, just forever present. One sign that a religious awakening is taking place in our culture is our obsession with angels. Images of angels are everywhere; they are characters in movies, images in books, on notecards and calendars, on curtains and wallpaper. Angels represent for us a vision of innocence, of beings not burdened by guilt or shame. Whether we imagine them the dark round-faced forms of Coptic tradition or the fair, winged cherubs that we usually see, they are messengers of the divine. We
see them as always bringing news that will give our hearts ease.

  Our cultural passion for the angelic expresses our longing to be in paradise, to return on earth to a time of connectedness and goodwill, to a time when we were heart-whole. Even though the images of angels we most commonly see are childlike figures aglow with rapture and unspeakable delight, as messengers they carry the weight of our burdens, our sorrows, and our joys. In representations they are most often given a childlike visage to remind us that enlightenment comes only as we return to a childlike state and are born again.

  We see angels as light-hearted creatures in swift motion reaching for the heavens. Their being and the weight of their knowledge is never static. Always changing, they see through our false selves. Possessing psychic insight, intuition, and the wisdom of the heart they stand for the promise of life fulfilled through the union of knowledge and responsibility. As guardians of the soul’s well-being, they care for us and with us. Our turning toward the angelic is evocative of our yearning to embrace spiritual growth. It reveals our collective desire to return to love.

  THE FIRST STORIES of angels I heard as a child were told at church. From religious teachings I learned that as messengers of the divine, angels were wise counselors. They were able to assist us in our spiritual growth. Unconditional lovers of the human spirit, they were there to help us face reality without fear. The story of an angel that remained most vivid to me throughout my childhood and on into my adult life was the narrative of Jacob’s confrontation with the angel on his way home. Jacob was not just any old biblical hero, he was a man capable of intense passionate love. Coming out of the wilderness, where as a young man he fled from familial strife, Jacob enters the land where his relatives live. He meets there his soul mate, Rachel. Even though he swiftly acknowledges his love for her, they can unite only after much hard work, struggle, and suffering.

  We are told Jacob served seven years for Rachel, but it seemed to him only a few days “so great was the love he had to her.” Interpreting this story in The Man Who Wrestled with God, John Sanford comments: “The fact that Jacob could fall in love at all shows that a certain amount of psychological growth had taken place in him during his journey through the wilderness. So far the only woman in his life had been his mother. As long as a man remains in a state of psychological development in which his mother is the most important woman to him, he cannot mature as a man. A man’s eros, his capacity for love and relatedness, must be freed from attachment to the mother, and able to reach out to a woman who is his contemporary; otherwise he remains a demanding, dependent, childish person.” Here Sanford is speaking about negative dependency, which is not the same as healthy attachment. Men who are positively attached to their mothers are able to balance that bond, negotiating dependency and autonomy, and can extend it to affectional bonds with other women. In fact, most women know that a man who genuinely loves his mother is likely to be a better friend, partner, or mate than a man who has always been overly dependent on his mother, expecting her to unconditionally meet all his needs. Since genuine love requires a recognition of the autonomy of ourselves and the other person, a man who has loved in childhood has already learned healthy practices of individuation. As Jacob labors for Rachel, making wrong choices and difficult decisions, he grows and matures. By the time they wed he is able to be a loving partner.

  Meeting his soul mate does not mean Jacob’s journey toward self-actualization and wholeness ends. When he receives the message from God that he should return to the home he once ran from, he must once again journey through the wilderness. Again and again wise spiritual teachers share with us the understanding that the journey toward self-actualization and spiritual growth is an arduous one, full of challenges. Usually it is downright difficult. Many of us believe our difficulties will end when we find a soul mate. Love does not lead to an end to difficulties, it provides us with the means to cope with our difficulties in ways that enhance our growth. Having worked and waited for love, Jacob becomes psychologically strong. He calls upon that strength when he must once again enter the wilderness to journey home.

  A divine voice brings Jacob the message that he must return to the land of his ancestors. As a man who has learned to love, Jacob intuitively asks for guidance. He listens to his heart speak. When the answer comes, he acts. Since he left home in the first place because he had conflicts with his brother Esau, the prospect of returning is frightening. But he must come face to face with his past and seek reconciliation if he is to know inner peace and become fully mature. On the long journey home Jacob continually engages in conversations with God. He prays. He meditates. Seeking solace in solitude he goes in the dead of the night and walks by a stream. There, a being he does not fully recognize wrestles with him. Unbeknownst to him, Jacob has been given the gift of meeting an angel face to face.

  Confronting his fears, his demons, his shadow self, Jacob surrenders the longing for safety. Psychologically he enters a primal night and returns to a psychic space where he is not yet fully awake. It is as though he becomes a child in the womb again striving to be reborn. The angel is not an adversary seeking to take his life, but rather comes as a witness enabling him to receive the insight that there is joy in struggle. His fear is replaced by a sense of calm. In Soul Food: Stories to Nourish the Spirit and the Heart, Jack Kornfield and Christina Feldman write that we too can choose serenity in the midst of struggle: “In that calmness we begin to understand that peace is not the opposite of challenge and hardship. We understand that the presence of light is not a result of darkness ending. Peace is found not in the absence of challenge but in our own capacity to be with hardship without judgment, prejudice, and resistance. We discover that we have the energy and the faith to heal ourselves, and the world, through an openheartedness in this movement.” As Jacob embraces his adversary, he moves through the darkness into the light.

  Rather than letting the angel go when light comes, Jacob demands and is given a blessing. Significantly, he cannot receive the blessing without first letting fear go and opening his heart to be touched by grace. Sanford writes: “Jacob refused to part with his experience until he knew its meaning, and this marked him as a man of spiritual greatness. Everyone who wrestles with his spiritual and psychological experience, and, no matter how dark or frightening it is, refuses to let it go until he discovers its meaning, is having something of the Jacob experience. Such a person can come through his dark struggle to the other side reborn, but one who retreats or runs from his encounter with spiritual reality cannot be transformed.” It should reassure us that the blessing the angel gives to Jacob comes in the form of a wound.

  Woundedness is not a cause for shame, it is necessary for spiritual growth and awakening. I can remember how strange it seemed to me as a child when I read this story over and over in my big book of Bible stories for children, that to be wounded could be a blessing. To my child’s mind woundedness was always negative. Being unable to protect oneself from hurts inflicted by others was a source of shame. In Coming Out of Shame, Gershen Kaufman and Lev Raphael contend: “Shame is the most disturbing emotion we ever experience directly about ourselves, for in the moment of shame we feel deeply divided from ourselves. Shame is like a wound made by an unseen hand, in response to defeat, failure or rejection. At the same moment that we feel most disconnected, we long to embrace ourselves once more, to feel reunited. Shame divides us from ourselves, just as it divides us from others, and because we still yearn for reunion, shame is deeply disturbing.” Shame about woundness keeps many people from seeking healing. They would rather deny or repress the reality of hurt. In our culture we hear a lot about guilt but not enough about the politics of shame. As long as we feel shame, we can never believe ourselves worthy of love.

  Shame about being hurt often has its origin in childhood. And it is then that many of us first learn that it is a virtue to be silent about pain. In Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries, psychoanalyst Alice Miller states: “Not to take one’s own suffering
seriously, to make light of it or even to laugh at it, is considered good manners in our culture. This attitude is even called a virtue and many people (at one time including myself) are proud of their lack of sensitivity toward their own fate and above all toward their own childhood.” As more people have found the courage to break through shame and speak about woundedness in their lives, we are now subjected to a mean-spirited cultural response, where all talk of woundedness is mocked. The belittling of anyone’s attempt to name a context within which they were wounded, were made a victim, is a form of shaming. It is psychological terrorism. Shaming breaks our hearts.

  All individuals who are genuinely seeking well-being within a healing context realize that it is important to that process not to make being a victim a stance of pride or a location from which to simply blame others. We need to speak our shame and our pain courageously in order to recover. Addressing woundedness is not about blaming others; however, it does allow individuals who have been, and are, hurt to insist on accountability and responsibility both from themselves and from those who were the agents of their suffering as well as those who bore witness. Constructive confrontation aids our healing.

  The story of Jacob’s confrontation with the angel is a narrative of healing precisely because it shows he is innocent. There is nothing he has done to anger the angel. The adversarial conflict is not of his making. He is not accountable. And he is not to blame for his wound. However, healing happens when he is able to embrace the wound as a blessing and assume responsibility for his actions.

  We are all wounded at times. A great many of us remain wounded in the place where we would know love. We carry that wound from childhood into adulthood and on into old age. The story of Jacob reminds us that embracing our wound is the way to heal. He accepts his vulnerability. Kornfield and Feldman remind us that the moment in which we are touched by pain and “the unpredictability of life’s changes” is the moment in which we can find salvation: “As we turn toward the specific shadows in our own lives with an open heart and a clear and focused mind, we cease resisting and begin to understand and to heal. In order to do this, we must learn to feel deeply, not so much opening our eyes as opening the inner sense of the mind and the heart.” When Jacob wrestles with the angel, he feels a heightened sense of awareness. Facing this struggle gives him the courage to persevere in his journey back to face conflicts and reconcile them rather than live in alienation and estrangement.