It Is Love Which Shatters Us

Love, and do what you will. 

- St. Augustine

Love promises happiness for those who wait and work for it.

The promise that love brings is precisely that which propels each and every human being to look for it. It is what drives us to search for those whom we will pledge our whole life to, knowing that only in determining who "the one" is can we actually be fulfilled. And because we find this to be an important part of our life, we look forward to it, anticipate it, plan it, and tie it up with other areas of human living. Furthermore, there is this tendency to look at love as if it is something that "adds over," that is, granting an even greater happiness to our once satisfied lives as if it is a fairy tale waiting to happen.

What happens, then, is that love becomes a part of a system defined by categories. One erects standards and preferences, the qualities that the beloved should possess in order to be loved. One creates an image of how love will occur, perhaps the best possible condition and situation where love will happen. One already looks forward to finding and being in love as if what lives in fantasy would exactly happen to reality. All of these seem that love, in its entirety, can be controlled, anticipated, expected, designed for one's own comfort.

But isn't this all empty fantasizing, which drifts us away from what we are supposed to be open to? Isn't love supposed to be something which happens, in the purest sense of the word? Isn't it the case that the most genuine expression and experience of love comes in the ways that we least expect it to be?

Indeed, it is true that in one way or another, love involves a sort of planning and anticipating, and that is perfectly normal, for love remains to be an important part of our lives. Who or what we choose to love would be an important part of our lives, and we wouldn't want to decide on it haphazardly. However, no amount of planning and determining could prepare or even pave us the way for love to happen. Unfortunately, love, despite all our ways to steer it, comes when it does. Moreover, it does not place itself as a mere supplement or accessory; rather, it is that which takes over and lies at the center, capturing our very own selves. It rampages and tramples  us down, brings us to our knees, as if it is something that completely surpasses our control. Such is love, so violent that drastically shatters our whole being and leaves our own destiny to itself.

Love can only be measured by love .

-Hans Urs Von Balthasar

Violence occurs in the different instances in the life of one who seeks for love. The cracks and crevices of a human being's existence is exposed once he realizes that he cannot live in this world in solitude, understanding the world on his own terms, proceeding with life on his own will, being once and for all the captain of his destiny. He might have everything that the world offers, and yet, it seems that none of these would finally grant him rest and consolation. Such emptiness leaves him wounded in the furthest recesses of his own being, as he realizes that there is nothing he owns and determines that would fill him and close his wound.

In his search, he comes to find the beloved who captivates him. The beloved appears to the lover as if she is someone he did not expect or anticipate, and could never look the same again. She comes at a surprise to him, and he begins to see something in the beloved that he did not see before. For him, she becomes the beautiful, the attractive, the desirable, and the incomparable. Perhaps, it happens that the beloved becomes captivated by the lover's own being, and he also comes out as a surprise to her, in such a way that he ceases to be someone she has used to know. He becomes different for her, and such difference captivates her so much that she cannot do anything but to be open to the whatever he might be in the times that they are together.

At such event, the walls and the barriers of both the lover and the beloved crash down, allowing both of them to recognize each other as distinct, precisely as a complete "you" to each other. The expectations and conditions that they have determined suddenly disappear, as if they do not matter and would have to be dealt with a later time. The past, the present, and the future that both the lover and the beloved has for themselves have now been redefined. And at that moment in their life, they learn to embrace each one's own possibility, including a possibility of being together for each other, a possibility that has not been considered in their solitude and that each of them does not expect or anticipate to happen.

Love has already broken down their barriers, but it would go further as to break down their whole selves in the process. In choosing to remain for each other, the own selves of the lover and the beloved break apart, especially when they experience the joys and the pains of remaining with each other. Both the lover and the beloved lose control of their own selves, for they live not just in terms of their individual choices, as if they will everything to happen in their own way; rather, they are being led, not of another force but of their own will, to make choices for both of them. The lover cannot just act as if he is the only one who matters in this world, instead his love for the beloved draws him, in a quite involuntary yet unforced way to do something for her, to think of and do something for her always. In the same way, the beloved can let herself go and be free from the demands that come with being with the lover, yet her happiness and fulfillment that she finds in him stops him from doing so. In the end, the beloved stays with the lover in the same way that he chooses to stay with her.

And in such decision to stay, the thorns of love spring out and bring forth another wave of destruction. Not only are their past, present and future as beings in solitude destroyed, love has tied the lover and the beloved together in a quite cunning and deceiving way: love gives space for one to make a decision, but love ties such freedom with that which makes us happy, with that which we cannot resist, and leaves us in such a way that we can only choose what makes us happy, or to be more precise, what makes us ourselves.

This is how love violates us and leaves the lover nothing but be with the beloved, not in a hopeless and desperate way but in such a way that both of them fully choose to be with each other even though they need not be. Both of them, as wholes, as beings who can live in themselves, who have their own determinations, plans, and definitions, are destroyed and one is thrown into each other: confined to pasts that cannot be changed, to a present that can only be embraced, and a future that would always remain unknown. And such experience of a kind of determination into the unknown makes it more difficult to love, for love breaks all forms of assurances and promises of happiness and leaves the lover and the beloved nothing except the assurance of being one with the other.

Such is the violence of love, which moves into its own space, determines everything in its own time, and lets things happen according to its own flow, its own will, its own plans, that both the lover and the beloved can only freely respond.

Where the danger is, there lies the saving power.

-Friedrich Holderlin

The pursuit of the lover to move toward the beloved leaves him impoverished, with nothing to hang on to except his fate with the beloved, as two persons left alone to themselves in the world. However, it is only in love that both the lover and the beloved is drawn into a path towards finding what they look for: the happiness that springs forth from the greater possibilities that are presented, definitely excessive and overflowing, more than both of them can handle or understand.  In being thrown into mystery, both the lover and the beloved find themselves thrown into infinity as well.

That is why in the end, love liberates. Love sets us free from the walls and the barriers that cover us, from our own expectations and anticipations that will only lead to misery and despair. It crushes our very foundations only to build a new one, that which is based on the dynamism of our very own being, filled with uncertainty yet overflowing possibility. Indeed, such destruction comes at the expense of losing our own conception of ourselves, with all the pain and disappointment comes at it, but it reforms us because it takes away those that prevent us from seeing us as ourselves, as to who we actually are.

But this liberation will not be possible as long as we let ourselves be freely taken by love. And in this regard, freedom is given space to operate and let one be taken by love. In fact, it is only in freedom which lets love do its work. But how does one decide in this regard? Simply, it is to be taken by love, to decide according to love, and such involves not only deciding to respond to love by loving back, but also and more importantly, affirming the meaning of one's responses, wagering that things in fact would be make sense and bear fruit through my free action. Such decisions would involve a movement, whether it be in the form of letting go, where love ends to pave way for it to happen differently, or in committing to love another, in which one fully embraces the surprise and mystery of what is to happen after deciding.  This affirms that indeed, the meaning and work of love can be understood and pursued only in freely and continuously deciding to love.

Such is the violence of love, which shatters us and builds us anew, but only if we are willing to be so.