The Wounds of Love: Part Five – Marc Gafni

marc gafni
published on marcgafni.com
please share comments on info@marcgafni.com

On the Wounds of Love: Part Five

All the great traditions of spirit, in their own way, show us that everything is one thing. Everything is one beautiful, radical, unknowable, ungraspable, vast, empty gorgeousness. Nothing, absolutely nothing needs to be rejected. But only a lover is willing to look directly into the eyes of reality, and see things exactly as they are. When we talk about spiritual courage–this is what we mean. When we talk about being a lover–this is what we mean. We do our best to embrace everything exactly as it is–in excruciating, gorgeous detail. We pay attention to all the ways we hide, slink away, or build up a solid story of breach and betrayal to assuage our feelings. Yet it is only when we give up our insistence on being right that we can
begin to be alive and aligned.

There is a time to wield Gabriel’s sword and demand justice. And there is a moment when our spiritual training instructs us to surrender instead, to let go, to relinquish our ideas, and to breathe into the unwanted sensations. Much as we would like to simply transcend devastating erotic experience, love tells us that the only way out is through. We cannot transcend painful experiences without going through them, without becoming them.

Hafiz says that:

“Love is the funeral pyre

Where the heart must lay


Its body.”

*****

How do we walk through the pain of Eros? There are three steps that I have been able to discern in my own pain. They are the three steps to God. And in each step you are already there.

The First Step is surrender.
The Second Step is to meet your brother and sister in the pain.
The Third Step is to meet God in the pain.

The First Step

Too often we resist pain. But extreme pain insists that we accept it. “Do not imagine,” pain says to us, “that it should be different than this. Forget your ideas of how it should be. Surrender to me. Settle into me. Prostrate yourself in the most deeply humbling way before me.” Let yourself feel the next moment of pain, then breathe another step into surrender.

Sometimes we are called to enter so deeply into the interiority of the pain–of erotic betrayal or the loss of a lover–that all our old certainties are completely destroyed. All of our constructs collapse, all of our idealized shrines to love fall apart. At these moments it hurts so much that there are no words to speak about it. The only thing we are able to do is let ourselves into the feeling, to live on the inside of the pain as it shifts and changes and ultimately, with grace, resolves.

The Second Step

Surrendering so deeply and unconditionally into the pain reveals another radical truth. Everyone is present within it. We are all hurt. In the brotherhoods and sisterhoods of pain, we realize the invisible lines of connection that weave us into an indestructible whole. It is the wholeness itself that has within it the erotic power to transmute and heal pain. Our suffering itself is born of the alienation that derives from the part and partial nature of our persons.

Meeting the other in pain, receiving the dignity of another’s story is a movement towards redemption. The mute, silent, and dumb experience of pain is redeemed and embraced through the felt experience of one’s word spoken, heard and received. In the recognition that our pain is part of the larger Pain, something softens and opens with the healing power of Wholeness. In the invitation of Wholeness, we catch a glimmer of the enlightenment born of pain–a radically democratizing enlightenment.

by Marc Gafni