Love makes us ache. When pain comes to others -- injury, illness, decline -- this is what anguish is, if we love. When we speak of it, it doesn't have to be eloquent to be poignant.
My mother is old, but healthy and alive. This is no guarantee. I've read of another man's mother, her long decline into the oblivion of dementia and the final release of death. It fills the heart with inexpressible sadness. Even more, in its echo of other remembered grief, such as we all have, or will.
We can love people -- opt to love them, volunteer -- people who are not worthy of love, humanly speaking. No need for elaboration. It’s a provocative, for all that betrayal might seem almost commonplace. And we drag ourselves away from such and such a situation trailing most of our courage and all of our hope behind. And being human, imperfect in our capacity for tranquility, we might be infected with rage like a low-grade fever.
Self-pity is not all bad. It should come with an awareness of our flaws. But who even has a right to an opinion about the secret flaws in someone else's secret heart? It's not your business. All this is the negative.
And if the ones who work havoc were to fall into the hands of their victims? Best not to speak of it. But the people we have loved, despite their betrayals? Of course we're angry.
Here’s what we have to tell ourselves. Quote: I did not love, that it might turn into hate. I did not sacrifice, that it should bring only loss.
To love is an act of will as much as a sort of pit into which we fall. This is what it means when we are told that love does not fail. It’s not that the flame doesn’t scorch but the light doesn’t fade. The outcome of love is not assured, but it's reality should not be in doubt.
Well. High-sounding sentiments about the unfailing character of love have little merit if they have no effect in the real world. But we do need soft phrases sometimes, as we need soft touches -- they are comforting. It isn’t only monkeys that clutch onto each other when the skies grow dark. That's a picture of ourselves. We are created to love. We were made that we might count ourselves less, that someone else might be more. There is no human race where this is not true.
It isn’t something that needs to be written in a holy book. It’s written in our hearts -- incised, rather, cut in deep and ragged gouges. This too might make us angry. What sane person wants more pain? But can it be helped? Honestly. We must, must love, and it hurts the way a little child cries when stung or struck. But we cannot escape our nature any more than we can change our destiny -- or rather, as fools and saints attempt, change the destiny of someone else. The transformative self-sacrifice of love.
The pundit George Will wrote about his mother's decline. He quotes ,J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan: God gave us memory that we might have roses in winter. How lovely a thought. There's the saying, pain comes to pass, not to stay. It calls to mind the fact that even in our wrath, we may forgo our demand for justice and discover almost out of vacuum a capacity for mercy, and forgiveness.
So, after a long and blessed life, George Wills mother, an old woman, descend into the darkness and indignity of senility. Her character, so carefully built-up over the decades, might fall away as cities succumb to earthquakes. What is left remains only as a mockery. But it doesn’t remain forever, and when she finally passes from sight, that dimming light might flair up bright as garden sunshine. So may we hope.
In this same way, we can only hope ... if we can hope ... that those who have passed beyond our sight, betraying, after having shed darkness upon our world like Satan in his fall -- they might with the passing of time enjoy a sort of dementia of an evil character -- where repentance works its transformation and nobility is found where only betrayal has been seen.
It cannot be that the world is destined only for decay. There must be some counterbalancing force, where the agony of watching those we love reduced almost to animals, is matched in some measure by the redemption of those who started life as animals, but who discover the very purpose of what humanity is. This would be grace, and a sort of justice too. For to be human is to be condemned to love.
You see the point. We concern ourselves mostly with comfort and prosperity. For what purpose? That we might be a more excellent sort of animal? It's an easy thing to hold out cliches of love and betrayal -- how wise I might seem. But honestly. What matters? We arrive at the answers we believe by going through our lives, like fishermen dragging nets. Maybe we come up with hope, and courage. But it takes strength. We grow strong by enduring trials. That's the point.
J
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