Into the Deep

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OFTENTIMES, we pray for something and then miss the miracle when it actually happens. Many have said, “I wish I could have great love,” while blind to the fact that it was standing right in front of them. So often the issue is not learning how to attract love, but rather how to recognize love. Especially when we have waited so long, it often an insidious trick of the mind to make sure we don’t really see it even after it finally arrives.

Sometimes, love arrives as though it were a spaceship landing in the backyard. The Captain comes out of the ship and says to us, “Hi, I’m here to beam you up! Come on! We’re going!”

Yet so many times we reject him saying, “Uh, well, I can’t just leave here so fast. Actually, I can’t even believe you’re here. How long do I have to prepare my things?”

And he says, “You have no time at all. Your entire life has been spent preparing. Now we must go quickly. If you wait, your eyes will adjust and you will no longer see me. I’ve landed for a bit, to pick you up. You have an hour, Max. You can make further plans from the ship.”

The Captain sees that we are bewildered, but so is he. “Haven’t you been asking for this for years?” he asks.

“Well, yes,” we say. “I have. But I guess I didn’t think you were coming….I sort of made a life for me here, in the meantime.”

“Not that much of one, judging from your prayers at night,” he tells us. “Let’s go, if you coming. I can’t wait forever.”

And then we say, if we say it, what is ultimately the most tragic thing we will ever say, and that is, “No, thank you.”

No, I don’t choose the ride, even though I want it desperately. No, I don’t want to beam up now, even thought it’s a living hell down here. No, I do not choose the path of wild and radical and authentic love, even though I know I am dying without it. I think I’ll just settle for “good enough.”

And why do we do that? Why do we not receive with open arms the answers to our prayers? Because we ourselves are authoring what will one day look like natural selection. The human race is turning a corner, and those who choose not to make the turn will keep going straight until they fall of the cliff ahead.

Angels are onboard those spaceships, appearing everywhere now, often in the guise of loved ones holding the torch that would light our way through darkness. On the other side of that darkness is the light in which dreams come true. But there are demons in that darkness, to be sure, and we can feel them. They almost paralyze us with fear. All those unloved parts of ourselves are there, ugly and twisted and ready to destroy. They live in the darkness, on the other side of which is paradise itself. Even though the only way to paradise is through the darkness—and even though the fire of the angel’s torch will burn the demons up, not us- we do not trust that. We lack faith. We are staunched and calcified in our refusal to choose love, and so we say to the angel, “No, you go ahead, I’ll stay here.”

The angel looks in disbelief; the refusal of ecstasy is unknown in heaven. The space captain can scarcely believe his ears, but noninterference in and respect for choices of another human being is a must on the enlightened path. Not that you can force anyone onto a spaceship anyway. One only rides on the wings of an angel if one is seriously committed to the experience of heaven. The lure of hell is so real here.

Still, as the ship takes off, the captain looks at the angel on board and notices that there are tiny sparkling rivers of water, falling from her eyes.

Back at headquarters, the angel reports to higher-ups.

“He chose not to go.”

The superior is silent, witnessing the angel’s pain. The angel continues. “I can hardly believe it. He chose not to go.”

“Do you think he understands the consequences?” Asks the superior.

“I don’t know,” says the angel. “I think he thinks that staying there is the more responsible thing to do,

“Responsible…to whom? To what?”

“I don’t know. It’s strange. He’s not ecstatically happy there, but he thinks it’s his duty to stay. He feels it’s an adult situation, and he lives in fear that he is not one.”

“Yes, of course. Well, we’ve seen this before. They choose psychology over poetry. We keep trying to evacuate that realm before the storm hits, but people refuse to evacuation.”

“Yes.”

“You prayed for him, of course.”

“Oh yes, with all my heart.”

“Well. Job well done. Sorry if your heart was a little bruised on this mission. It’s one of those risks, you know. It can happen, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Still, they’re touching creatures. Contentious, but touching.”

“Yes.”

The angel was trained for love, she was disciplined in love, but her tears still flowed.

“You’re excused. You may go.”

As the angel turned around to weep, her superiors called her back. “I say, one thing…Do you remember---you’ll see him again someday.”

“Will I really Master? Will I really?”

“Of course you will. You must cling to your own faith at times like these. How can you convince them of theirs, if you don’t?”

Marianne Williamson
Enchanted Love

What's the matter Rudy, this doesn't sound like you.

"Well I suppose its about a guy who wants to change the world but nobody's listening....

I mean how does one break through the Berlin Wall of social cultural, and political emptiness and paralysis? Into the Great Beyond, that timeless and mysterious universe of the Divine????

Not through any normal means that's for sure."

I was listening Rudy, understood, and will do everything I can to pick up where you left off.

Dedicated to my bestest buddy in the whole world.

Recently, a friend mentioned a couple by the name of Abelard and Heloise. This was the first time I ever heard of them, so, of course, I went and looked them up.

"Abelard and Heloise are one of the most celebrated couples of all time, known for their love affair... and for the tragedy that separated them.

In a letter to Abelard, Heloise wrote: "You know, beloved, as the whole world knows, how much I have lost in you, how at one wretched stroke of fortune that supreme act of flagrant treachery robbed me of my very self in robbing me of you; and how my sorrow for my loss is nothing compared with what I feel for the manner in which I lost you."

It's perhaps the most tragic love story ever ... Abelard and Heloise were two well-educated people, brought together by their passion, then separated by the act of her uncle's vengeance.

Peter Abelard (1079-1142) was a French philosopher, considered one of the greatest thinkers of the 12th century. Among his works is "Sic et Non," a list of 158 philosophical and theological questions. His teachings were controversial, and he was repeatedly charged with heresy. Even with the controversy that surrounded him at times, nothing probably prepared him for the consequences of his love affair with Heloise, a relationship destined to change his life in dramatic ways.

Heloise (1101-1164) was the niece and pride of Canon Fulbert. She was well-educated by her uncle in Paris. Abelard later writes in his "Historica Calamitatum": "Her uncle's love for her was equaled only by his desire that she should have the best education which he could possibly procure for her. Of no mean beauty, she stood out above all by reason of her abundant knowledge of letters."

Wishing to become acquainted with Heloise, Abelard persuaded Fulbert to allow him to teach Heloise. Using the pretext that his own house was a "handicap" to his studies, Abelard further moved in to the house of Heloise and her uncle. She was supposedly a great beauty, one of the most well-educated women of her time; so, perhaps it's not surprising that Abelard and she became lovers. Also, she was more than 20 years younger than Abelard... And, of course, Fulbert discovered their love, as Abelard would later write: "Oh, how great was the uncle's grief when he learned the truth, and how bitter was the sorrow of the lovers when we were forced to part!"

They were separated, but that didn't end the affair. Instead, they discovered that Heloise was pregnant... She left her uncle's house when he was not at home; and she stayed with Abelard's sister until Astrolabe was born.

Abelard asked for Fulbert's forgiveness, and permission to marry Heloise; then with Fulbert's assent, Abelard tried to persuade Heloise to marry him. In Chapter 7 of "Historia Calamitatum," Abelard wrote: "She, however, most violently disapproved of this, and for two chief reasons: the danger thereof, and the disgrace which it would bring upon me... What penalties, she said, would the world rightly demand of her if she should rob it of so shining a light!"

When she finally agreed to become Abelard's wife, Heloise told him, "Then there is no more left but this, that in our doom the sorrow yet to come shall be no less than the love we two have already known." In regard to that statement, Abelard later wrote, in his "Historica," "Nor in this, as now the whole world knows, did she lack the spirit of prophecy."

Secretly married, the couple left Astrolabe with Abelard's sister. When Heloise went to stay with the nuns at Argenteuil, her uncle and kinsmen believe Abelard had cast her off, forcing her to become a nun.

Violently incensed, they laid a plot against me, and one night while I all unsuspecting was asleep in a secret room in my lodgings, they broke in with the help of one of my servants whom they had bribed. There they had vengeance on me with a most cruel and most shameful punishment, such as astounded the whole world; for they cut off those parts of my body with which I had done that which was the cause of their sorrow."

Of course, there's more to this story which I have read, but found it incredibly heart-breaking. A movie was made about this famous couple - which I have ordered - and I hope to get in the mail this week. I'll be sure to blog about it - if I can.