I told a dear friend about what I was trying to do. She laughed. I said I could do everything perhaps a nun might do, except I liked my things. She laughed again. Celibacy? She laughed more. She doesn't understand. How does one give up something that she doesn't have? But given the opportunity to "give it up," would I? I don't know. Perhaps that would be the most difficult question.
I had a priest once speak to me about love. Falling in love is inevitable. It's what you choose to do with it that matters. I think that was one of the most important things I have ever been told. I never really thought about that part of it before. Usually I would think, if God grants in you the desire to love another person, well...you should respond to it with vigor.
The trouble is, or the conflict, or the resistance is that, when you feel claimed by God, no matter how delicious a prospect might appear to be, there exists within you an internal knowing that the experience with another human being is transcendent, while the encounter with God never stops. With God, if you turn to His love, it is always present, always deep, always passionate. With a person, there is timing...the great chain around human existence, that you are either in sync with another person, or you are not.
I have been in love many times in my life, and probably 'in lust' many more. But that kind of bonding with another human being in complete trust, I have never known. Sadly, as I discuss the subject with my friends over my lifetime, I find that most of them have never known 'true love' either. They have 'settled.' The good part about that is that many of them are very content with it.
We foolish romantics seek the ideal, the perfect love...and the only place we can truly find it is in God. It is the only food that satisfies our hearts completely.
If you read all the great poetry about God, you will discover how perfect that love can be and how it manifests itself in the human person.
It allows us to love others without reservations, and of course, without expectations. Perhaps in loving God, we learn how to love others.
But the Body is always a problem. It lusts and hungers and craves immediate satisfaction. Most of our technological is geared to satisfy an immediate hunger. Waiting is not even an art anymore, it is an endangered species. We want, and we want now. The most troubling fact is that, when we get what we want, we are only satisfied for seconds...and then we want something else. I think our entire economy survives my our unsatiable desires. We literally are consumers of anything and everything...and because we seek that which becomes dust in the wind, when we look back all we have is dust and memory.
The memory then plagues us. If it is a good memory, we long for what we used to have. If it is a unpleasant memory, we ruminate over and over about how we could have, should have, done it right. Unbridled memories lead to deep depression, which is a form of living death. We become zombies to the real world, going through the motions, and waiting for what we long for to arrive joyously at our door.
But it doesn't need to be that way. God alone suffices. Those of us who are poets; we must rely on the unprovable existence of God to keep us sane. We search for the higher ground. We dream of a perfect world where people love one another and do not exploit one another and make certain every child has an abundance of love and sufficient food for each day.
I am waxing...a fictional priest in the movie "Stigmata" is asked by a pretty young woman, "Don't you miss it?" [the sex] And he replies most wisely, "Not really. I have simply traded one set of problems for another."
Whenever we make a choice, we pick something up and leave something else behind. It's part of the deal of discernment. There will always be a new set of problems. That's really quite good. It makes us grow.
To not decide, that is the only true Dark Night of the Soul, I think. Always wondering if you did the right thing, or was it the best thing...or was it selfish...what were my motives? What were their motives? Did I consider all the possibilities? Should I change my mind? To me, that is the Dark Night: to wonder if I did the right thing.
The way out, for me, is to surrender it all to God. By myself, I am left in a hell on earth, never knowing if I pulled my weight, made the world better, loved enough, worked enough...but if I can just give it ALL to God, then grace abounds and the peace given me pours like honey onto everyone else I meet.
Why would anyone want anything different?
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