Love is Not a Four-Letter Word

Unfortunately love is a word used too liberally to label almost any relative emotion. I love him, expresses the feeling between two romantically involved people. Yet the same word describes the affection for family, friends, pets; or appreciation for a new sweater, a favored pair of shoes, even the weather.

We also say Love to describe the Supreme Source of Life.

Language shapes our perception of reality. I think we take the power of language for granted. We should be more conscious of what we say, and to do that we must be more aware of what we mean.

Interestingly, in Spanish, Te quiero means "I love you", but the verb querer means both -to want, and -to feel affection for. I find the dual association to be more honest, in an ironic way. Often when we say I love you, what we really mean is, I want you, I want to possess you.

I take issue when a friend claims the impetus for her writing is love, when we both know she is referring to countless romantic entanglements that are more often emanations of obsession, desire, jealousy, and intrigue. We have all misused the word, love.

I propose using another word for that kind of passionate addiction that we misname as love: eros. (Erotic love or desire.) This way we will need to be honest from the moment we communicate it in words; and maybe we will be less likely to delude ourselves, or others. She and I are in eros. Then when it is truly love it can be called love, with all the trust and mutual respect to which such a title alludes.

Then, also, we can be assured we honor Love as the Divine Mystery that is all. And we can love our mother and son of course, which is accurate (in most cases). And we can adore a new sweater or those old broken-in pair of sneakers.

Thoughts from Hafiz

A poem by Hafiz, a fourteenth century Sufi poet:

I have learned so much from God

That I can no longer call myself

a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew.

The Truth has shared so much of itself with me

that I can no longer call myself

a man, a woman, an angel

or even pure soul.

Love has befriended me so completely

It has turned to ash and freed me

of every concept and image

my mind has ever known.

(From Daniel Ladinsky's The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master)

The Other

I was reading an article in Harper's Bazaar this weekend about French lawmakers considering whether or not to outlaw the burka (full-body covering for women, used by particular sects of Islam), and the more common hijab (the simple headscarf, often worn by a young woman in this country with jeans and sneakers).

Whether or not I agree with the belief system behind these garments is irrelevant. I'm astounded that a Western government would think it remotely in its realm to dictate what a citizen can and cannot wear.

What is it in us that fights to be right at any cost? What is it in us that is so utterly threatened by The Other?

Relax, Apocalypse is Just the Death of Ego

A Storm. The Woman and the Dragon

Page from the Apocalypse, an illuminate manuscript, c. 1320

Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection

The imagery comes from Revelation 12:-3: "...a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was with child and wailed aloud in pain as she labored to give birth. Then another sign appeared in the sky; it was a huge red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns..."

As a fanatic reader and lover of art, I’m fascinated by allegory and its multi-layered possibilities. I am disregarding the traditional, literalist explanation of this imagery to consider something else:

She is Hagia Sophia, Divine Wisdom, known as the feminine aspect of God. After transcending the seven demons that represent stages of experiential understanding in the material world, she sits at the eighth level, the cosmos, the mythological refuge of the Goddess. Her Wisdom leads (in this case, her child, or in other terms, her world of children: us) to the Mysterious Portal of All.

In other words, after toiling in identification with experience, the ego dies allowing the human-being to be handed over by Wisdom and Understanding to its true nature.

A Name

Although I had the idea for this blog some time ago, I couldn't find the right title. Until my mom found a small book in an antique store entitled Meditations for Women, ed. by Jean Abernathy, 1947. On the title page the owner of the book had written in cursive: "vigorous faith, love, and steadfastness."

The book has an entry for every day of the year and today, August 20, Josephine W. Johnson wrote:

'AND A TIME TO CAST AWAY

And religion can also be an ugly thing. More depraved in some of its middle-class respectable aspects than in the unprintable rantings of fundamentalists in London parks, or the hysterical leapings of revivals.

I sat in the office of a prominent minister in the city while he spoke over the phone about buying a Negro church building. The matter concerned crossing that invisible line between white and Negro districts. And the minister became apoplectic with rage... "You can't do this thing! We can't afford to have these values go down!"

And so the real-estate values of the church were firmly mortared...

In spite of the magnificent and backbreaking efforts of some, it has been said with terrible truth, "The church is the largest Jim-Crow organization in the United States." '

Her thoughts are eye-opening, even radical for 1947. Wisdom shows Herself any time, any place. More on Wisdom tomorrow...

A Place to Start

While I figure out the blogger widgets and gadgets, I'll simply start with a poem of my own.

ON WAKING

1

Dawn comes thin, grey, clear

There is no metaphor here

Just grey blueness, this proclaimed

In the first light

Undo night, unto the dark sight

The seeing again over again

2

I woke up, to face the dark

But the dark would not turn my way

And in my dreaming, when the dark came for me

I woke, just as it said my name

3

If but a word

Could send me into the flame

My name, spoken in Your voice

The opening of the fire-guarded door,

Entry to absurd, everlasting pure

Original Statement of Purpose

My intention for the meditations on this blog is to explore faith and inspire faith community. I hope that it will bring together people like myself who seek community and contemplation though choose to do so outside the context of a single religious practice, as well as those who do express their faith and community within a particular religion. The idea is to share and ponder what unifies us while offering what divides us to the Mystery of the infinite variety of Creative Genius.

Although I do not subscribe wholly to the Catholic Church or its doctrines, my childhood upbringing in Catholicism still informs the language and imagery of my faith, as does: Buddhist meditation and teachings, Sufi poems and stories, the forgiveness of Rosh Hashanah and the exile of Passover Seder, the Hindu mind-body yoga practice, Native American nature and ancestor worship, quantum physics, and “New Age” concepts of self-awareness and healing; not to mention the insights of various people I encounter on life’s journey who share a glimpse of their own individual Faith.

A friend who was being “reborn” in the Christian faith once questioned my relationship to the Bible. “So you think you can just pick and choose which things to follow from the Bible?” she asked me incredulously. My answer to her, after ten years of thinking about it, is yes. I follow my heart and conscience, which I believe is my compass to God* as well as my direct guidance from God, as I discern Truth in human ideas, creations, and texts. The reason I can find strength and wisdom in all the places I listed above is because they illumine the same love and the same quality of Light, whatever the particular culture or vernacular the Light is diffused through.

Some will take offense at this sense of the Divine. I can only say that when we close our hearts, we miss out on another one of the infinite ways to know and witness the One.

Thus, these meditations are meant to foster vigorous faith.

Please share your judicious comments and feel free to make topic suggestions. I hope what you read here will enrich your heart and mind wherever you are, whatever your challenges in life may be.

*Note on “God”: In our ineffective and futile human attempts to name, label, and classify things, we also try to name the ultimate beautiful monstrosity of the Unknown. God, Allah, Yahweh… Throughout these writings I use many “names” for this inexplicable source familiarly known as God. Therefore, in my writing (and my heart) God = the One, Light, the Divine, the Abyss, You, Love, Creator, Life, the Universe, the Unknown, Genius, Mystery, Grace, the Truth and so on.