Has great love been a path for your own transformation?
Great love and great suffering are universal paths to transformation
That gem of wisdom is the guiding light for all the content on my website. It comes from Richard Rohr, a Franciscan Catholic priest, whose writing is a valuable gift to us all.
As you know, from infancy through adulthood, it would be difficult to live a life that didn’t include some degree of love and suffering. In this post I focus on being loved and loving. But what may be surprising is that the key for both love and suffering to become paths to transformation is vulnerability. In what follows, watch for the vulnerability amidst the hope and joys of love.
Being loved affirms or strengthens parts of ourselves that we sense or vulnerably hope are positive. That affirmation can put us on paths from some degree of loneliness to relationship, sadness to joy, despair to confidence, or fear and isolation to greater engagement with life and community.
But I hope you’ve experienced being loved doing more than that. We all have parts of ourselves that we tend to keep secret, can feel ashamed of as weaknesses, and so tend to isolate off to one side or exile. We act as if they are not parts of ourselves when they are, and we cannot actually rid ourselves of them. Being loved can do more than affirm our positive vision of ourselves. It can open and expand us. Being loved for more parts of ourselves than we thought were loveable is transforming because we become more whole. We move beyond our usual limited boundaries and protections, our usual limited concerns, our usual sense of control, our limited feelings, and even perceptions. Can you also see the vulnerability and hope in those movements? They can change how we see and identify ourselves. We can feel ourselves becoming more whole, re-finding and welcoming what was exiled and seemed lost.
Loving someone or something else operates similarly. We vulnerably open ourselves and let them come in behind our usual limiting boundaries and protections, our limited concerns, our usual sense of control, our limited feelings and perceptions. We make room and they become new integral parts of ourselves. We expand ourselves when we love. We also are vulnerable as we change and as we open ourselves to losing the beloved.
We are initiated into these experiences of vulnerability and potential transformation when, among other ways, we make a new close friend, we fall in love, commit ourselves to someone in long-term love as in marriage, or become loving parents. Even though all these expansive movements can make us feel more vulnerable, we also typically feel more alive, stronger, even brave, all with a new caring and appreciative orientation toward our beloved–whether it be another person, a group, or something else such as the earth, something in nature, or even something more abstract such as learning or democracy.
Questions: Has great love been a path for your own transformation? How? If not, has it been something you’ve longed for?
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