I had to invest in the love and understand that with the love comes the pain. So when he tells me that, the monologue is already there. Does that make sense?
I think there is, not in the sense that I enjoy it, but that it's an important question. It's the question, "Does the presence of pain mean God doesn't care? Does God not love me anymore?" I think that's a very common connection we tend to make.
Craziest thing I ever did for love? It's all crazy. None of it makes any sense, does it, when you're in love with someone. It doesn't make any logical sense. I guess that's why they call it being in love.
I think there is, not in the sense that I enjoy it, but that it's an important question. It's the question, "Does the presence of pain mean God doesn't care? Does God not love me anymore?" I think that's a very common connection we tend to make. I see that a lot in my own life and in the lives of others.
Loving with human love, one may pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death, can shatter it. It is all the very nature of the soul. Love is life. All, all that I understand, I understand only because of love. All is bound up in love alone. Love is God and dying means for me a particle of love, to go back to the universal and eternal source of love.
When I started dating I had this kind of Romeo and Juliet, fateful, romantic idea about love. It was almost that you were a victim - that there was a lot of pain involved and that was how it should be. Shakespeare said the course of true love never did run smooth and I had a sense it had to be painful. It was such a revelation to realise it shouldn't be that way and you get to choose who you love and who you give your heart to.
Suffering is primarily a
call for attention, which itself is a movement of love. More than
happiness, love wants growth, the widening and deepening of awareness and consciousness and being. Whatever prevents that, becomes a cause of pain, and love does not shirk from pain.
I made such a fool of myself,” she lamented. “Love does not make you a fool.” “He didn’t love me back.” “That does not make you a fool, either.” “Just tell me …” Her voice cracked. “When does it stop hurting?” “Sometimes never.
So yes. It had flaws, but what does that matter when it comes to matters of the heart? We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That's as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.
Love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, I'll be anybody you want me to be. Use me. Change me. I can be thin with big breasts and big hair. Take me apart. Make me into anything, but just love me.
Forgiving is love's toughest work, and love's biggest risk. If you twist it into something it was never meant to be, it can make you a doormat or an insufferable manipulator. Forgiving seems almost unnatural. Our sense of fairness tells us people should pay for the wrong they do. But forgiving is love's power to break nature's rule.
Grief does not end and love does not die and nothing fills its graven place. With grace, pain is transmuted into the gold of wisdom and compassion and the lesser coin of muted sadness and resignation; but something leaden of it remains, to become the kernel arond which more pain accretes (a black pearl): one pain becomes every other pain ... unless one strips away, one by one, the layers of pain to get to the heart of the pain - and this causes more pain, pain so intense as to feel like evisceration.
Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain. Love itself is pain, you might say -the pain of being truly alive.
There's love and there's romantic love. The Greeks had different words for different kinds of love. And we just got "love." I don't know what you would call the other kinds - maybe brotherly love, Christian love, the love of Saint Francis, love of everyone and everything. Then there's romantic love, which, by and large, is a pain in the ass, a kind of trauma.
All right, I'll take a chance. I will fall in love with you. If i'm a fool you can have the night, you can have the morning too. Can you cook and sew. make flowers grow. Do you understand my pain? Are you willing to risk it all or is your love in vain?
With someone you like that much, the lows are as low as the highs are high. Does that make sense?' It does. It also makes me sound bipolar.' Love will do that to a person.
I believe in God, not because the Bible tells me that he is, but because my heart tells me so; and the same heart tells me we can only have His peace with us if we love Him and obey Him, and that we can only he happy when we each love our neighbour better than ourselves.