LOVE DOESNT JUST COME WITH SHARING YOUR PERSONAL SPACE WITH A PERSON. ITS AN ESSENCE, A SENSE OF BEING THAT YOU PERCEIVE IN A PERSON YOU MEET THAT YOU FEEL CONNECTED WITH. ITS THE BEAUTY FROM WITHIN THE PERSON THAT SHOULD DRAW YOU TO THEM. TAKE TIME TO SEE IF YOU CONNECT ENOUGH TO INVITE THAT PERSON TO SHARE YOUR SPACE. YOU SHOULD ONLY DO THAT IF YOU FEEL REASONABLY CONFIDENT THAT YOU ARE BOTH GOING TO GROW FROM THE EXPERIENCE.... ADDICTIVE LOVE The heart in love remains soft and sensitive. But when youre hell-bent on getting this or the other thing, you become ruthless, hard, and insensitive. How can you love people when you need people? You can only use them. If I need you to make me happy, Ive got to use you, Ive got to manipulate you, Ive got to find ways and means of winning you. I cannot let you be free. I can only love people when I have emptied my life of people. When I die to the need for people, then Im right in the desert. In the beginning it feels awful, it feels lonely, but if you can take it for a while, youll suddenly discover that it isnt lonely at all. It is solitude, it is aloneness, and the desert begins to flower. Then at last youll know what love is, what God is, what reality is. But in the beginning giving up the drug can be tough, unless you have a very keen understanding or unless you have suffered enough. Its a great thing to have suffered. Only then can you get sick of it. You can make use of suffering to end suffering. Most people simply go on suffering. That explains the conflict I sometimes have between the role of spiritual director and that of therapist. A therapist says, Lets ease the suffering. The spiritual director says, Let her suffer, shell get sick of this way of relating to people and shell finally decide to break out of this prison of emotional dependence on others. Shall I offer a palliative or remove a cancer? Its not easy to decide. A person slams a book on the table in disgust. Let him keep slamming it on the table. Dont pick up the book for him and tell him its all right. Spirituality is awareness, awareness, awareness, awareness, awareness, awareness. When your mother got angry with you, she didnt say there was something wrong with her, she said there was something wrong with you; otherwise she wouldnt have been angry. Well, I made the great discovery that if you are angry, Mother, theres something wrong with you. So youd better cope with your anger. Stay with it and cope with it. Its not mine. Whether theres something wrong with me or not, Ill examine that independently of your anger. Im not going to be influenced by your anger. The funny thing is that when I can do this without feeling any negativity toward another, I can be quite objective about myself, too. Only a very aware person can refuse to pick up the guilt and anger, can say, Youre having a tantrum. Too bad. I dont feel the slightest desire to rescue you anymore, and I refuse to feel guilty. Im not going to hate myself for anything Ive done. Thats what guilt is. Im not going to give myself a bad feeling and whip myself for anything I have done, either right or wrong. Im ready to analyze it, to watch it, and say, Well, if I did wrong, it was in unawareness. Nobody does wrong in awareness. Thats why theologians tell us very beautifully that Jesus could do no wrong. That makes very good sense to me, because the enlightened person can do no wrong. The enlightened person is free. Jesus was free and because he was free, he couldnt do any wrong. But since you can do wrong, youre not free. .....................ANTONY DE MELLO
Posted on: Sat, 16 Aug 2014 10:00:20 +0000
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