Transcendence

Listen with Your Heart : Seeking the Sacred in Romantic Love
By Eileen Flanagan

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I recall times in my twenties when I showered men with affection and kindness, believing myself to be loving. I listened to their problems and pretended to understand. I did little errands for them. I sent sentimental notes. I was not desperate to get married. I just wanted adoration, and I hoped they would give it to me if I was sweet, generous, and entertaining enough. Of course, I tried to hide my need. I once drove around a city block three times in rush-hour traffic to avoid arriving early for a date, not wanting to appear too eager. The next week, I spent hours wondering whether to call the guy to say I had a good time or wait to see if he called me. He never called.

Looking back, I realize I wanted a boyfriend to fill the hole at the center of my life. I was growing disillusioned with the debt-ridden nonprofit where I worked. Unable to share these feelings with my coworkers, I felt increasingly isolated. I dreamed romance would refocus my energies and give my life new meaning. I thought a man would end my loneliness. I became intently aware of the men I passed in the supermarket, the bookstore, the gym. I scanned them like dresses in a department store display, trying them on in my imagination. The most stressful part was trying to sell myself. The few dates I had during this time felt like job interviews. I tried to impress them with my superior girlfriend qualifications and went home lonelier than before.

After one such disappointing experience, I took my dog and headed to the mountains for a week of solitude. This began a process of turning within for solace, refocusing my life from the inside out. I realized I had lost touch with my inner core, that quiet center that bonds me to the rest of creation. That was why I felt so alienated. I struggled to put words to this experience and gradually realized that rather than my job or my dating strategy, it was my relationship with God that was lacking. At first, I resisted using the word God because it conjured up an image of the Lincoln Memorial (an old white man looking down from a throne), an image I long ago rejected. I tried other words-Higher Power, Universe, Great Spirit, Goddess. For a while I wrote in my journal about the "Great Something," but that was too clumsy for the poet in me. Tentatively I began using the word God, careful not to ascribe it the pronoun He.

I now envision God as the unseen source that connects all beings, as groundwater links forest and field. When we love, we affirm our deep connectedness. We open a channel to the source and are refilled like a fresh spring well. In contrast, when we act out of fear and selfishness-operating from the having mode-we reinforce our illusion of separateness. We cut off the source, alienating ourselves from God and others.

Sometimes we try to manipulate God with the same market strategies we use on people. We suggest a deal-"I'll never skip services again if you send me a husband"-and confuse this with devotion. But God can't be manipulated. Opening to the sacred source means letting go of our wish lists and trusting we will be given all we need. It means forsaking the having mode and adopting the being mode. It means trusting in life's abundance. This message can be found in many spiritual traditions, as in the Gospel passage where Jesus tells his disciples not to be anxious about their lives, pointing to the birds of the air which are fed and the lilies of the field which are beautifully clothed. Zen Buddhism offers a similar message: live in the moment; stop sweating the small stuff.

This type of radical trust is difficult to practice. Our capitalist culture teaches scarcity, competition, and faith in hard work. We grow up believing everything we receive is the result of our own earnest efforts, including love. Although I've adopted a lilies-of-the-field approach to material concerns-choosing meaningful jobs over profitable ones-I've been less trusting of love, particularly romantic love. That's been the one area of my life where I always felt anxious, believing that if I didn't run after love, it would never find me. On a deep level, I feared I would always be love-poor.

Reading the courtship manuals, I realized how they play on such fears-fear of loneliness, fear of being an old maid, fear of never having children. Relying on fate is described as "haphazard, inefficient, and unnecessary," and we are cautioned not to believe in magic or (it is implied) God. Instead, we must have faith in the author's advice. The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right promises "a marriage truly made in heaven" for the faithful. The authors proclaim, "The Rules way is not a hobby, but a religion. We keep doing The Rules until the ring is on our finger!"

The claim that The Rules way is "a religion" is revealing. This religion is merely a list of rules followed in order to receive a reward-instead of heaven itself, a marriage "made in heaven." For me, religion is not a way to make deals with God; it is a way to let ourselves be guided and shaped by the source of all love. Religion is like the well that helps us reach the groundwater. It is not the source itself; it is a path to the source. Comparing The Rules to religion reveals another truth about today's secular culture: we worship romantic love in place of God. The wedding ring is a modern golden calf, an idol we dance around, hoping it will save us.

In We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love, Jungian psychologist Robert A. Johnson argues that in Western culture romantic love has "supplanted religion as the arena in which men and women seek meaning, transcendence, wholeness, and ecstasy." This explains why we pursue romance so fervently, cling to it so tightly, and feel so disappointed when it fails to save us. If having a lover or spouse is perceived to be the only way we can experience union, it's no wonder we are so desperate. We long to feel connected to something greater than ourselves. When we seek a partner merely to fill our own emptiness, however, we are not really loving, not really reaching beyond ourselves. A relationship in which two people use each other to mask their loneliness will not ultimately provide the transcendence they seek.

A romantic relationship can help us experience transcendence, as long as we don't make the relationship itself the object of our worship. A deep connection to another person can help us feel connected to all of creation. We see the Divine reflected in our beloved and feel our own divine core uplifted by our partner's love for us. When we think of love as a commodity, there is always a price to be paid. The more I give my partner, the less I have for myself or others. But when love flows through us from the sacred source, then new possibilities become imaginable. Because there is enough love to go around, we never need to ration it. Romantic love becomes an expression of the sacred rather than a substitute for it.

For Sharon, learning to trust that she will always have plenty of love profoundly changed her approach to relationships. Having grown up in an affectionless family, Sharon says that for the first half of her life she lived with a feeling of scarcity, but a powerful experience in nature helped to recircuit her thinking. One day, she stood just below the edge of a lake with water spilling over the top. "I caught water in my hands, and I didn't need to cup it and hold it all. I could see all the water in the world in that lake. I could see the whole system coming, and I knew what abundance was like. Once my body got the message of abundance-and it came from the water spilling through my open hands-I felt that I would never clutch again. I would never have to live in a scarcity model." Sharon states, "I now trust in the abundance of the universe."

Sharon relates this trust to romantic love. "Now, choosing to be in a relationship, I'm more able to keep my focus on the All-of-it, which is the sacred for me. I'm not coming from a place of deficit. I'm coming from a place of abundance. Having a primary partner the way my life is structured now is just a complete gift." She looks upward and says, "I wasn't looking for this. And thank you!" Sharon says her romantic relationship with Mary Amanda feeds her work promoting women's art and culture. "I have more to give my work, more to give my community, more to give wherever I am." Sharon explains that intimacy fosters a powerful energy between partners that can get locked inside a relationship. "Whenever that flow is happening with us, our first response is to start to share it with other people. It's a different way of relating than I've had in the past. We're not looking into each other's eyes, saying, ?Aren't we having a good time here?' We're saying, ?What can we do now to share this?'"

© 1998 by Eileen Flanagan

About the Author

I don't know if this book will change anyone else's life, but it certainly changed mine! The process of writing about the spiritual nature of loving helped to open me up to love in my own life. Chapter topics presented themselves as I moved from singleness to dating to commitment. My writing and my life enriched each other along the way. The fact that I now am able to share that story with others through this book is an added blessing.