Love strengthens and transforms. It also frightens.
Experiencing love, unadulterated, unconditional, and freely given soothes us in places long hardened and crusted over time by insults and wounds inflicted in the flesh and to our character and emotions.
Love and acceptance despite and because of who we are, faults, shortcomings, warts and all exhumes not only our previous injuries, but lifts our vulnerabilities to the surface.
The frightened girls and boys that our hard exteriors have hidden over the years are summoned forth.
We descend to our knees in the face of an eternal truth.
We all need and crave love.
Without it we grow stale and hard-hearted, hating and despising not only the world around us, but most poignantly and sadly, ourselves.
Assailed by the torrents of tight finances and too little time spent with each other due to the demands of work and responsibilities to family of origin, never mind our culture’s obsession with youth and ever present call to work out, exercise, meditate and better ourselves, it is a wonder we even consider the possibility of marrying.
Once bound in matrimony by either the laws of our residence or that along with our religious beliefs, we resort to the above and start down the path of affairs with those aspects of ourselves that we refuse to bring into the marriage.
Infidelity exists both in the flesh and in the heart. The truth for most of use lies in the latter. Unable to love and accept ourselves as we are, we refuse and continually avoid beholding our reflection in the eyes of our Beloved.
What would it mean to see who we are, as we are in the reflection of our husband or wife’s eyes?
I am my Beloved; my Beloved is mine. (Song of Solomon/Song of Songs, 6:3)
Are we so awful that no possibility exists for self-acceptance?
Or is it the pursuit of perfection that blinds us to the beauty of the imperfection that not only makes us human and whole, but also opens the door to transformation?
The dark blots of failures and what we most hate about ourselves give us character. The jagged edges of character and personality provide a rack or handle upon which to catch the love and adoration of another.
Who wants to be married to a deity all perfect and excellent?
Most often what draws us to another is the weakness and human frailty we see in them, but that reflects which we loathe in ourselves.
Offering our love we seek to heal not just them, but to transform ourselves.
And when they return the favor, and love us back?
What then?
Or perhaps we seek healing in the arms of another, seeing ourselves as broken and destroyed we surmise that by attaching ourselves to the all perfect person of The Other they will save us.
But what if in joining our weak selves to them we strengthen them?
What if in loving us they truly bring forth our beauty, our perfect qualities, all that we have abandoned and relinquished hope of ever seeing in ourselves?
What if they recognize the humanity in us and love us as we are, something we have never done or envisioned doing, or that we even could?
Marriage is a rocky road, one of give and take, holding and relinquishing, standing and kneeling, conviction and surrender.
Marianne Williamson sums up our greatest challenge that of realizing that we are lovable in this poem.
Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate,
but that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant,
gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us.
It is not just in some; it is in everyone.
And, as we let our own light shine, we consciously give
other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.
~Nelson Mandela
Last Modified by Ryan Keeling Oct. 29, 2005