Is There A Place?
Is there a place one can go
to say “I’m on fire,”
where instead of a dousing,
I am met by
a knowing glance,
a smile emanating
from the heart?
Love is always a flow…
When Love awakens in the human heart, its force can overwhelm the nervous system. With this poem, I was opening to witness and wisdom for being with what I was experiencing.
Why does Love awaken us?
How do we hold this beautiful intensity responsibly?
Are there guides for this geography of the spiritual life.
The Emergence of Love, Context and Guidance
This SAND podcast episode with guests Cynthia Bourgeault and A.H. Almaas has been a nourishing guide to illuminate how love emerges, often in the flow between humans.
Bourgeault shares autobiographically about the development of love in a formative relationship with her teacher Rafe to ground this teaching in a human context. She normalizes the first force of divine eros that draws us into a whirlpool of attraction, emphatic that this force must not be repressed or denied and the second force that comes against the initial emergence as pain and patterns rise up.
According to Bourgeault, for spacious and transformative love to manifest, there must be a purification, a reconciling force that deepens the flow into mutual self-giving where something new can be tasted:
Cynthia Bourgeault: There's a union that either consumes or is consumed by the object of its craving. And there's a union that allows a deeper differentiation, a deeper diversification to come into being.
That was what got Teilhard de Chardin so excited when he was teaching about love. And at one point is quoted was saying the structure of the universe is love. He was talking about this basic evolutionary principle of union diversifies and diversity unites so that people who are in a bond of relationship at that, that highest and most spacious and dare say non dual level are able in a particularly realized way.
To hold in their hearts the other's entire becoming and to create space for the other to differentiate diversity and become more whole, become themselves within the nurturing field of this dynamic bond.
There is an element of crucifixion to use Christian language or pain built right into the emergence of love…
You have to begin with this fundamental constriction or conflation, the desiring, which is also the source of evil if it doesn't turn around. But but then that has to transform itself. Suffer itself to be laid down for the sake of something else so that a larger and more spacious love emerges in its wake, which can hold the opposites at a new level.
And I think it's at that point that relationships get stuck and life gets stuck. We just don't know how to navigate that first step in the full transcendent. A manifestation of love that first step, which is me mine all the time, I want and allow it to turn around and something that says, may you be well.
If that initial Eros is tempered and transformed in the deep kenosis, as they call it in Christianity, that willingness to make space, to let go in honesty, to look at your own stuff in as much as it's hurting the beloved, to confess to repent.
So it's the struggle to realize this love at a higher level…it really transforms that initial kind of free boost you get from the initial attraction into something sacred. And holy safe, and flowing, transfigured. It's the transfiguration of the particular, not the denial of it, or repression of it, or elimination of it.
Almaas’ poetic language about love is stabilizing and evocative.
A.H. Almaas: What is love? Because what most people call love is not the love you're talking about. Not the love that liberates. What most people call love is an emotional thing, it's an emotion.
It's more akin to desire. And wanting and possessiveness. And it's true, you love somebody, you like them, all of that. But that emotion is the way I see it. Most people, what they think love is an emotional thing. But most people know as love, is not what I call love. That is the outer, the shadow of love.
And the outer expression, the outer reverberation of love, which by that time is distorted by history and relation and hurts and abandonment and betrayal and all of that. And also by the self centered ego. What people call love. Most of the time, I love my friend. I love my wife.
I love my kids and all that is true. But the love I'm talking about is the actual syrup. That flows from God's heart, the syrup that liberate the sweet syrup of goodness. So you could experience it in its beingness and its fullness. As a substantiality that is a glowing. And giving and dynamic substantiality when I say substantiality, you don't just feel an energy or emotion, you feel something filling your heart, filling your soul, filling it to the brim, filling it with something that is nourishing.
So we need to know what love is, and not deceive ourselves that we know love because we love somebody, we might yet not know where this loving somebody comes from. It comes from the essence of love, which for us to know love, we need to know the essence of love, which is the beingness of love, the ontology of love, which is God's love.
The divine love is something that is true, that is objective is. Not produced by the past, not produced by relationship, not because somebody is good to me, they're beautiful. I love them. It's produced by something naturally giving the true love. First of all, it is a beingness as a a medium of fullness and richness.
It has a texture that has a taste. It has a an aroma like appreciative love, for instance, and I appreciate it when I say I like somebody. When you go to the essence of it, it's beautiful, pink, fluffy, like a fluffy pink rose and it smells like roses. When you go to passionate love, it's deep pomegranate color and pomegranate flavor.
And it is like a pomegranate syrup. And so when I talk about love, I'm talking about the ontological dimension of love, which mean the truth of love as it is, as is emanates from the divine source, not the outer expression, which is saying something or doing something that is loving all these are good, but that these are not love.
And if love, the true love is there, then the expression will naturally be giving, not self centered, will bring in union with space…if we love somebody, we want what's good for them. We love them because we know them as much for what they are as possible.
Where I know them and their uniqueness and their preciousness and we want what's good for them. We love them not because we want something from them, but we want to give something to them. And then, and there is a mutual love, then an exchange of giving. Really, which expands the love, which brings, which the syrup becomes a puddle.
The puddle becomes a lake and the lake becomes an ocean. And that ocean is what I call divine love or non dual love. So it's important, that from the beginning, we know, we question ourselves, do we really know what love is?
I’m Kirsten, a spiritual director in Vashon, WA. If you find resonance here and need spacious witness, you can read more about space I hold in in-person and online spiritual direction and accompaniment.
