This is old... from India old... but updated and amended...
Love-
It’s a beautiful thing. To fall in love is to come to one another completely unabashed - completely naked. But not physically naked - emotionally, cognitively, and spiritually: completely naked. Naked to ourselves, naked to the other. The process takes the willful act to engage in the other, the willful act to participate in that stretch towards liminus - the ultimate Other.
Naked to our personages - as they've been torn off by the other. We allow ourselves to shed some of our personages - to the point that we can - but then that other tears away at the final layers. We stand in control of our actions, and it is willful for us to come to the other, but the process is only partly within our locus of control. They tear the layers that not even we can see. They tear to the point where it’s not really even that we fall in love - but that we are pulled into it.
And its not that we try to fall in love, its that - for the moments that we are truly in love - we try to convince ourselves that we aren’t. Because love is too good to be true. Because love IS the cheesy conquer-all that we are all searching for. And as such, we can't believe it when it happens - truly happens. We don't ever try to fall in love. We desperately try - with all our humanely might - to fall out of it.
Because - as Buechner put is - "life is complicated enough as it is" after all. The joy associated with love, is eternally yoked to the insufferable pain that is the layers of enmeshment into personhood that we illusion ourselves with. The joy that is love is the pain that is the disillusionment to our own illusions that we present to ourselves. It is the pain of disenfranchisement. It is the pain of disequilibrium, as we are pulled out of ourselves, into union with the other. We walk in relation to another, letting the gentle breeze caress our faces; our hands entwined with the other, conversations turn from simple “how are yous” to more complex “who are yous.” And in listening through the words of the other – never to – we come to the point of removal. As we remove that which clothes (our personages) our inner selves (our Person) to the other, so do they do the same. Until there are layers that we can't see; our skin still holds us back. Our skin is those layers of our personage that we have become blind to, that we can no longer – or could never in the first place – locate and begin to know how to remove. It requires liminus. It requires the presence of the other to see these things. And the other begins to remove things that we can’t; they begin to remove the skin that traps us. And it begins to be unbearable, as they are exposing things that we haven’t dealt with, or have colluded from our dealings. They begin to Know us: to Know us naked.
The Joy associated with true Agape love from Christ is eternally yoked to the unbearable pain of our own deaths. We make the willful act to love Christ, to take up our crosses - sun blaring on our shorn backs - and walk painstakingly up the hill while the sun and the flies and the splinters and shards of wood tear us apart. We make the willful act to lie down for our Lord, to let the nails be rammed through our wrists, to watch the blood spew from freshly created orifices not meant for human life. We make the decision to do all of this, and realize for a split second the immense, immeasurable pain that is Love, and we try with all our might’s to pull ourselves off - to convince ourselves it isn't real. We try to fall - to fall out of Love. And then His hands pin us there to it. His hands are the ones that pull us back to our pain - our death. This pain - the vulnerability - of having to be completely real: completely naked. And truly, it’s only the love of Christ that makes the love of Christ bearable. It’s only the love of Christ that makes the love of Christ not ultimately that which does us in.
Love-
It’s a beautiful thing. To fall in love is to come to one another completely unabashed - completely naked. But not physically naked - emotionally, cognitively, and spiritually: completely naked. Naked to ourselves, naked to the other. The process takes the willful act to engage in the other, the willful act to participate in that stretch towards liminus - the ultimate Other.
Naked to our personages - as they've been torn off by the other. We allow ourselves to shed some of our personages - to the point that we can - but then that other tears away at the final layers. We stand in control of our actions, and it is willful for us to come to the other, but the process is only partly within our locus of control. They tear the layers that not even we can see. They tear to the point where it’s not really even that we fall in love - but that we are pulled into it.
And its not that we try to fall in love, its that - for the moments that we are truly in love - we try to convince ourselves that we aren’t. Because love is too good to be true. Because love IS the cheesy conquer-all that we are all searching for. And as such, we can't believe it when it happens - truly happens. We don't ever try to fall in love. We desperately try - with all our humanely might - to fall out of it.
Because - as Buechner put is - "life is complicated enough as it is" after all. The joy associated with love, is eternally yoked to the insufferable pain that is the layers of enmeshment into personhood that we illusion ourselves with. The joy that is love is the pain that is the disillusionment to our own illusions that we present to ourselves. It is the pain of disenfranchisement. It is the pain of disequilibrium, as we are pulled out of ourselves, into union with the other. We walk in relation to another, letting the gentle breeze caress our faces; our hands entwined with the other, conversations turn from simple “how are yous” to more complex “who are yous.” And in listening through the words of the other – never to – we come to the point of removal. As we remove that which clothes (our personages) our inner selves (our Person) to the other, so do they do the same. Until there are layers that we can't see; our skin still holds us back. Our skin is those layers of our personage that we have become blind to, that we can no longer – or could never in the first place – locate and begin to know how to remove. It requires liminus. It requires the presence of the other to see these things. And the other begins to remove things that we can’t; they begin to remove the skin that traps us. And it begins to be unbearable, as they are exposing things that we haven’t dealt with, or have colluded from our dealings. They begin to Know us: to Know us naked.
The Joy associated with true Agape love from Christ is eternally yoked to the unbearable pain of our own deaths. We make the willful act to love Christ, to take up our crosses - sun blaring on our shorn backs - and walk painstakingly up the hill while the sun and the flies and the splinters and shards of wood tear us apart. We make the willful act to lie down for our Lord, to let the nails be rammed through our wrists, to watch the blood spew from freshly created orifices not meant for human life. We make the decision to do all of this, and realize for a split second the immense, immeasurable pain that is Love, and we try with all our might’s to pull ourselves off - to convince ourselves it isn't real. We try to fall - to fall out of Love. And then His hands pin us there to it. His hands are the ones that pull us back to our pain - our death. This pain - the vulnerability - of having to be completely real: completely naked. And truly, it’s only the love of Christ that makes the love of Christ bearable. It’s only the love of Christ that makes the love of Christ not ultimately that which does us in.
posted by Thinker Joe | 10:19 PM
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