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.

Ponder Points: Love As That Of Oneself

You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

We sometimes treat the duty to love as a form of obligatory exchange, in which we love others on the basis of how much we love ourselves. And working within that frame, it seems that there is the tendency to impose a kind of limit or maximum on self-giving, making sure that they don't go outside or beyond the way we give ourselves. There is also the tendency for us to appropriate our own form of self-giving, that we expect others to act in the same way as we do, or to live in the way that we expect them to be.

But that, unfortunately, is not what the Lord meant when he said that we are called to love our neighbor as ourselves.

In saying this, the Lord points out two important things. First, he calls for a recognition of our own selves' being. He is called to recognize the mystery that we are, that our whole selves are full of meaning, that there is more to it than the particulars that we have used to define ourselves. In saying that we ought to love ourselves, the Lord calls us to view our whole selves with a new set of eyes, with a perspective that accounts for the richness of our being as created. We are called to see the "beyond" that is in us, that we cannot be pinned down to anything we can say about ourselves: our identities, our past, our problems, our crises.

And with this view of our own selves as a mystery is the very basis of our own self-giving. Because we cannot box ourselves, all the more are we called towards an openness and acceptance of another who is radically different, and in that difference, radically the same as we are. To love the other is precisely to recognize the mystery of the other, to know and respect that she is different from us. To love is to respond to the call to recognize and cherish the other that we cannot reduce to our own way of understanding or to our own selves, and always be unconditionally open to her as she is, in the same way that we are called to open to who we are. Simply put, the second thing that the Lord calls us is to approach the other simply and precisely as another, standing outside the self yet as rich and as meaningful as the self. Only in the recognition of such difference can one respond towards the call to love, a recognition which the Lord has first and foremost recognized and shown to humanity.

And that is why we are called to love with all our soul, mind, and heart, because it takes great effort to genuinely love. We have the tendency to love what is pleasing to us, to what conforms to our standards, our categories, and our notions of other people; however, in these circumstances, we somehow forgot what we are actually called to do, which is precisely to transcend our own self-defined notions and let the mystery and meaning of the other captivate us by being open and patient to the other which shows herself. This mystery is precisely what will draw us towards giving more than what is expected economically, more than we can actually bear. It is then that we put our lives at risk for the sake of the other, precisely because we have allowed ourselves to be captivated by her.

Thus, it is only in recognizing our own being that we become aware of our called to do regarding the being of others.

It consists in the very fact that, in God and with God, I love even the person whom I do not like or even know. This can only take place on the basis of an intimate encounter with God, an encounter which has become a communion of will, even affecting my feelings. Then I learn to look on this other person not simply with my eyes and my feelings, but from the perspective of Jesus Christ. His friend is my friend. Going beyond exterior appearances, I perceive in others an interior desire for a sign of love, of concern.

-Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est 18

Ponder Points: Love and the Unknown "You"

"Is love the love of someone or the love of some thing?"

-Jacques Derrida on Love and Being

I love you, for you are you.

What brings people together are the qualities that they possess. What makes one fall in love with another is the fact that there are things that are attractive in the other, something that is so pleasing that one is drawn to approach and become intimate with the other. In whatever form and aspect of the other which we consider as attractive, the very moment that one encounters the other, carrying all that is attractive and pleasing, is an aesthetic encounter, which leaves us amazed, enamored, captivated. It makes us wonder: could this be the one that I am searching for my whole life, that which brings me to eternal bliss?

There is no precise answer as to why human beings develop these feelings of attraction to what is considered pleasing. Men and women of faith say that it is a form of awakening to the Divine, who is the Beautiful and the Good, while those who believe in the grand design of life as described by science insist that it is associated with the desire to propagate better offspring. But whatever one believes in, it cannot be denied that one is led to love the other because there is something in the other that one finds attractive, and without it, perhaps the bringing together of these two beings would not take place. They would remain to be enclosed in themselves, without anything that could draw them to each other.

But that which is pleasing, and the will to be pleased with the other, cannot be the bedrock of love, because if such, love betrays itself by being reductive. When love is taken as a love of the attractive, the appealing, then it ceases to be a love for the other, to be an utmost movement of the heart and of one's being. The love of the attractive serves as a prison that prevents a lover from appreciating the beloved, and in fact hinders the passage of the lover to the beloved. At the most, this kind of the love is the most self-conceited, self-gratifying and narcissistic form of love that fails to reach its fullness, its very actuality.

"somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence"

-e.e. cummings

Love, in its fullness, is an act of a radical movement of the heart, from one's own to that which is absolutely and irreducibly other. It does not rest on the attractive, the comfortable, the stable, and the systematic. This movement is always towards the other constantly, and does not rest with the satisfaction of the self. The lover is that who constantly searches for the beloved, knowing that even in the intimacy with the other, there is still this distance, this insurmountable gap, that keeps them apart, for the beloved is a complete other. It is the very yearning to see, to know, and to recognize the other, to attempt to bridge this gap, which cannot be really brought together.

And who is the beloved as other, whom love cannot ultimately grasp? The beloved as the other i cannot be reduced, a who that cannot be defined as a what which is a part of her. In her very being, the beloved is a revelation and a mystery, a revelation because something is being left in the open to be known, appreciated, and loved, but is also a mystery, for there is something more that is still to emerge, an aletheia that love patiently waits for and excites the lover. In the same way, love is both the greatest affirmation and the greatest refusal, an affirmation of the being of the beloved, but at the same time, a refusal to reduce her to what makes her attractive, likeable, or worth loving. Love does not capture and grasp the other; rather, love lets the beloved be.

That is why love, as a movement, displaces the lover's very own being in a radical way. Love shakes the very foundation of one's existence and gives him a different view not only of the beloved's existence, but his own as well. But in this displacement, it is up to the lover to do something about it: will he curl back to his own self, to his own comforts, or will he let himself be displaced and move into a new direction, to advance to the beloved, the absolute other, which beckons him to responsibility in the same way that she is beckoned by the lover's alterity?

This brings us to the most difficult question that lovers have to answer in every moment of their lives as they live in love (or at least they think they do): when things about the beloved change, and they fade away, and transforms the beloved in an unexpected way, in ways that we don't think are not worth it, do we still love the person? Do we still maintain the lively exchange of meanings, significations, of personhood, the play of all of these which constantly reminds us that not all things go the way we want them to be? And we are brought back to Derrida's question: do we love someone or something?

"Even if eros is at first mainly covetous and ascending, a fascination for the great promise of happiness, in drawing near to the other, it is less and less concerned with itself, increasingly seeks the happiness of the other, is concerned more and more with the beloved, bestows itself and wants to “be there for” the other. The element of agape thus enters into this love, for otherwise eros is impoverished and even loses its own nature. On the other hand, man cannot live by oblative, descending love alone. He cannot always give, he must also receive. Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift."

-Benedict XVI, "Deus Caritas Est"

If love is that which brings together what is irreducible, then the lover must keep on loving, constantly moving from the self to other, to attempt to constantly be attracted and amazed not by the things that the beloved possesses but by who one really is.

And perhaps that is the purpose of commitment, of the lover affirming to himself and to the beloved that he will always love her. It is in commitment that he is reminded that love is being always in motion, in constant attraction and amazement in the very being of the beloved. It is that which reminds the lover that when he approaches the beloved, he does so with wonder, seeing, appreciating, and loving her as if she had never been sought, appreciated, and loved in each and every moment.

That is why Paul speaks of love as being patient, kind, not envy, not boastful, not proud, not self-seeking, not easily angered, not keeping any record of wrongs, and does not delight in evil. These categories speak of love being fixated, attached in a certain image of the beloved. Rather, true love rejoices in the truth, the very truth of the being of the beloved. Her being that cannot be grasped, conceptualized, defined completely.

That is why to love you for you are "you," would be inadequate.

Rather, it is to love you because you are.

Always.