I'm thinking about Valentine's Day - it's coming up, you know. Marianne Williamson writes in her collection of prayers Illuminata,
"there is a difference between romance and love. Often the true path of love begins only when romance has begun to taper off, for love is the capacity to see light when darkness has begun to eclipse it...
Many people are proficient at romance who are not proficient at love. They see the humanness of their partner and say, Nah, I want romance again. Then they start over elsewhere, beginning again the path that will always end up in the exact same place" (pp 148-49).
I like the way she puts this, for it challenges the romantic in me to think more seriously about the love that I must sometimes will toward others. I don't mean just in my marriage - although it's true that the will to love is necessary to make that relationship work. The will to love is required to be a pastor, too.
Some days I reach my maximum capacity for caring and the idyllic nature of the pastorate is lost. Some days I don't want to love the complaining congregant and it becomes an act of pure volition to maintain the level of care and concern the person in front of me needs. And some days I fail totally, pretending not to notice the needs and pains of others.
It's rather like walking down the hall with a cell phone to my ear, pretending to be on the phone even though no one is on the line - all so I can avoid engagement with another person. Maybe it's weakness, or maybe it's just a fighting chance at living to love another day.
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I am reminded of Plato's Symposium when Socrates deals with the question of the object of love: “Then try to tell me about Love,” Socrates said. “Is Love a love of nothing or of something?
If love is a god then love has no object, but if love is a love of something, then there is an object to be pursued. In the same way Euripides poetically expresses:
“Ever lusts the earth for rain…Lusts too the mighty heaven, filling full with rain,/To fall on earth.”
The parched earth desires the rain and the rain desires to fail on the parched earth. So, each is made for the other. As a newbie to love, I depend on the wisdom of my Greek teachers to help me out.
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