Love comes when manipulation stops; when you think more about the other person than about his or her reactions to you. When you dare to reveal yourself fully. When you dare to be vulnerable.
Love comes when manipulation stops; when you think more about the other person than about his or her reactions to you. When you dare to reveal yourself fully. When you dare to be vulnerable.
The tendency in our spiritual life but also our more general attitude toward love is that our feelings are all that is going on. And so to us the totality of love is what we feel. But to really love someone requires commitment, fidelity and vulnerability. Mother Teresa wasn't "feeling" Christ's love, and she could have shut down. But she was up at 4:30 every morning for Jesus, and still writing to him, "Your happiness is all I want."
The trip was about being vulnerable, but not afraid; about opening himself up like a tin can and exposing his guts to the wind and the sky, and somehow finding a way to go beyond his limits. If he could do that, salvation was his. This, he didn't have to remember. Working on salvation - each creature must do that on his own. No preacher could tell you how. No friend could ease the way. No one but you, yourself, could make peace that would last for eternity.
What shames us, what we most fear to tell, does not set us apart from others; it binds us together if only we can take the risk to speak it.
...being a good actor is the exact emotional opposite of what it takes to be a successful inmate. Rather than close off all feeling and look tough, you have to open your vulnerable self up, and withstand often cruel laughter as you try to find some authentic emotion within you. In this way, a Level IV, high-security prison is no different from high school.
"As earthly creatures continually subject to relative disappointment, pain, and loss, we cannot avoid feeling vulnerable. Yet as an open channel through which great love enters this world, the human heart remains invincible. Being wholly and genuinely human means standing firmly planted in both dimensions, celebrating that we are both vulnerable and indestructible at the same time. Here at this crossroads where yes and no, limitless love and human limitation, intersect, we discover the essential human calling: progressively unveiling the sun in our heart, that it may embrace the whole of ourselves and the whole of creation within the sprere of its radiant warmth."
It can feel humiliating, in our culture of "self-love," to be ravaged with desire for another.
But what feels so impossible is that it simply hurts. The cells cry. The sex aches. The heart does indeed break. Split to the core, you are bleeding and bare, and you cannot comprehend.
The mind freezes to find an answer that will make...it...stop..."I deserve better." "It's time to move on." "I must learn to love myself."
The spirit life is truncated just there, with the mind's easy solutions. The mind's coveted prize to become a reasonable, well-adjusted person who will not embarrass herself one more time - who will, in the future and for all time, steer clear of inchoate, self-confounding intensity.
You haven't yet opened your heart fully, to life, to each moment. The peaceful warrior's way is not about invulnerability, but absolute vulnerability--to the world, to life, and to the Presence you felt. All along I've shown you by example that a warrior's life is not about imagined perfection or victory; it is about love. Love is a warrior's sword; wherever it cuts, it gives life, not death.
