The story is told of the middle-aged business man, a straight-laced and sober guy never seen out of a pair of trousers and a shirt, coming home from a week at work to announce to his wife of 25 years, “You bore me. I’m leaving.”
Taking to a life of reckless driving, hard drinking, and sleeping around with a number of much younger women, the man is finally seen by his teenage daughter at a rock festival.
The poor girl’s father is seen up at the front, in his ripped jeans and t-shirt (never before seen until now), bopping like a fool whilst draped around a girl only slightly older than his daughter.
The girl’s words of reaction sum it up: “I have never felt so embarrassed!”
What drives a person to abandon, seemingly at a whim, a marriage and family to pursue pleasure?
Maybe it’s a mystery… but hearing this tale and reading some words from C.S. Lewis led me to feeling that love is one topic from which we have stayed away for too long.
Love, my friends, is perhaps the ultimate form of freedom. And yet, in all truth, it is the most constraining condition of all. Whether love for family, friends, or soul-mate… love is the greatest paradox of all.
Principles of Love
As Timothy Keller, a protestant Christian minister from New York, writes:
One of the principles of love – either love for a friend or romantic love – is that you have to lose independence to attain greater intimacy.
Before I entered into my own marriage, I was not prepared for the levels of intimacy which we can attain through love. Having been a serial monogamist for most of my late teens, I was wholly unprepared for the responsibility which comes when you fall in love with a partner.
What do I mean? The fact of the matter is that a love relationship limits your options. You can no longer date whomever you please, sleep around at a whim, or allow yourself to remain guarded. True love demands the intimacy which builds trust.
As C.S Lewis writes:
Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal.
Wrap it around carefully with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safely in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.
But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.
Seeking Freedom
Our middle-aged businessman, in declaring himself “bored”, was likely to be making a bid for some imagined freedom. In time-honoured tradition, despite mistaking liberty for freedom, he was desperate to attain that which, one can only suspect, he had prevented himself from ever attaining: a sense of who he really was.
Perhaps the greatest self-damnation that arises from Lewis’ observation is that, when you lock away your heart from all others, you invariably end up locking it away from yourself too. Through guarding oneself from intimacy, and the risk of hurt, with others you almost always end up losing connection with your own sense of true identity.
Lacking love for others, confusing joy with pleasure (whether sexual or otherwise), we are driven ever further from the core of who we are as humans. Locked in the safe, dark, motionless and airless place of emotional safety we quickly forget what we looked like when we were younger.
Freedom, as Keller writes, “is not the absence of limitations and constraints but it is finding the right ones, those that fit our nature and liberate us.”
Saying “No” To Allow “Yes”
Love that seeks intimacy requires effort. You cannot simply expect the flame of passion to keep burning if you are not prepared to split the logs that will feed it for a lifetime.
Giving, an attitude of service and putting oneself into activity that serves, is the fuel that keeps the passion of love alive. In all of the smallest things there are opportunities to love (which, incidentally, is best viewed as a verb), from clearing away the washing up to offering to spend time in the bosom of your partners’ greatest interests.
Love is certainly never one-way either. It is a relationship entered into when BOTH people, whether friends or family, partners or neighbours, allow themselves to risk the tragedy of losing. Hearts unlocked into relationships of love are the most free of all.
Yet to achieve such a love, an intimacy with another, you must be prepared to say “No” to all that would threaten it.
No to the temptations of selfish wants, whether of sexual desire or over-absorption with personal hobbies. No also to the petty laziness of action that can come from a guarded and fearful heart.
The “Yes” for love must be overwhelming, wholehearted and seated in activity. When you are reckless enough to risk love then, dear reader, you are open to the possibility of intimacy.
What’s This Got To Do With Religion?
Lots, really.
Firstly, love with another human being is at the heart of spirituality world-wide and throughout history. All of the major faiths attest to the value of service to others, and to the intimacy of spirit that arises from love.
Secondly, however, love is an antidote to that negative reaction one might have when confronted with the realities of spiritual growth: that you must restrict your behaviour to attain something greater.
Jews, Muslims and Christians all regard God as a “jealous” god, a being who desires our love and who wants us to commit to Him wholeheartedly, in a relationship of intimate surrender. Hindus and Sikhs, likewise, point to the need for intimate human and spiritual relationships which transcend our selves and lift us into higher communion with that spirit which is in all things.
In short, without tackling love you cannot have any claim on a healthy spirituality. Ritual without love is, simply, empty. Words uttered in the dark, without reference to any other being, are directed to no-one but ourselves… and meaningless.
It is through our relationships with each other, and towards God, that we can truly become free.
