The Miracle of Love
This post originally appeared on an earlier blog I wrote. It is one of the most frighteningly raw posts I have ever shared. It deals with a fear many of us struggle with: the fear of being loved and the fear of being fully known. I want to share it again for you– married or not; in love yet or not– because it was so transformative for me in understanding what real relationship and intimacy mean, and the truth behind the Miracle of Love.
“The Miracle of Love is not in the falling, but in the remaining.”
I believed before one had to be perfect; whole; complete in and of themselves in order to be able to love and be loved by another.
I know now that is not true.
In fact it is not just untrue, it is ridiculous. We cannot ever be perfectly whole. Not ever.
We can however, love.
And what’s more incredible, we can even allow ourselves to be loved as well.
This weekend I thought my fiance and I were through. I thought the romance and love-story was over. I even foresaw the blog post that would officially declare it so to the world.
In my dark and wicked imagination I saw myself alone again free from the trial, the responsibility, and the pain of dealing with relationship.
It felt good; self destruction often does.
As we failed more and more miserably in our efforts to communicate, my heart slipped away to dress itself again in thick silver armour, readying for protection over ever falling in love again.
As my Man spoke, I heard only the things that verified my terribleness, and none of the things that testified to his love.
I shut off the remembrance of joy once shared and prepared myself for the end, listing in my head the benefits of singleness.
I lied and told myself Lucca would not remember this man who once loved him like a father.
What happened?
A darkness known clinically as depression, happened.
For any who have ever suffered it, you know as I do the touch of that icy hand on your soul, and how it feeds you lies, twisting and distorting the happiness in your life until all the light and laughter is wrung out.
It is evil. It is a thief.
Periods of life are lived oceans away from it’s shadows, and you thrive weeks at a time in a spring of hope and faith that seems as everlasting as it does real.
Then, late one morning, It returns.
It walks up the garden steps and straight in through the back door. A chill wraps around the room as it sets down it’s bags, never even needing to announce itself “home”.
Without a word, you know the party is over. You are Persephone returning to Hades.
It has happened again to me. This weekend I felt that strong and controlling hand on the back of my throat and I knew It had me once more, a master reclaiming it’s slave.
I was there in that room with my Man and my son, but at the same time, I was being taken from them.
I knew I would be taken from light and love, from Man in Kentucky and from Lucca, and I could do nothing but submit, to return to that prison I was convinced I belong.
I went there in my thoughts and stood inside the same old bars of the cage.—the bars of the cage that is my past, that is my family—my mother, and her mother, and the mother before her. The bars of the cage that are the story telling me how and why it will be repeated.
But I didn’t stay there. I am not in that cage today.
How?
I don’t know for sure.
I think it had something to do with Grace.
One moment I was prepared to witness the end of love, the next I was saved by it.
Not the kind of love you experience when you are first falling, but the kind of love that gives you the glimpse of being 92 and held by an unconditional devotion as you sit side- by- side on a rocker some evening in May.
My Man came to Hades. But because he could not, nor was never meant to, rescue me, he did something else…he just sat with me there and let me be sad.
He held me while I cried and spit terrible thoughts and then told me to look him in the eye.
“I can do this with you. You can be broken and sad and I can still love you.”
And he went on,
“No matter if this is something that comes around in predictable or unpredictable ways, we can prepare for it and we will overcome it each time together; you don’t have to face it alone anymore.”
He prayed for us and I let him love me.
I allowed myself to be loved as I am, broken, unwhole and suffering.
When we fall in love we are the most perfect versions of ourselves, propelled higher than the angels, with hope and optimism.
When we settle into life we discover again the demons that have always persecuted us.
We need a lifetime to learn how to fight them, and we don’t have to slay every one of them before we are worthy of finding and being loved.
Self-help books will have you believe otherwise, but there is no need to have everything together before you give yourself to someone else. You only need to have wisdom enough within to know when you have truly found someone worthy of your imperfections.
Find yourself a good man who will come and sit with you inside your sadness to share the weight of it with you; a man who is is not just willing to fall but to remain in love, even when it hurts.
I have a good man and I know there is one out there for you too. Perhaps, nearer than you think.
The miracle of love is not in the falling, it is in the remaining. We will want to flee, but if we can learn to remain, and to allow ourselves to be loved in the light of our brokenness, we will overcome.
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Leave a comment below and please tell me your thoughts. Have you ever experienced the fear of being love and fully known?
