Each every so often, the curtain of consciousness we mistake for actuality elements and we glimpse what glows past it.
Some name it thriller.
Some name it God.
Some discover it within the molecular construction of mycelium beneath a microscope.
Some within the colour of the sunshine after a summer time storm.
Some in the gaze of an osprey.
Some in Bach.
Nowhere is our contact with the sacred extra direct, or extra disorienting, than in love — that unusual and wondrous mirror for the thriller we’re. “Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Besides love,” the younger Susan Sontag wrote in her diary. And on the identical time nothing reveals us to ourselves extra utterly or higher maps our incompleteness. As we really feel its thriller unfold in us, we contact the sacred. “Love is my faith,” Keats wrote in his letters to the love of his brief life. “Gamble every little thing for love, in case you are a real human being,” urged Rumi as he anchored his devotional poetry in love.
This understanding of affection as a portal to the sacred comes alive with nice ardour and poignancy within the poet Christian Wiman’s meditative memoir My Shiny Abyss (public library). (As with Rumi, as with the gospels, one needn’t share Wiman’s specific taste of religion to be moved by the religious fact in his writing.)
In consonance with the science of limbic revision and its haunting corollary that “who we’re and who we turn out to be relies upon, partly, on whom we love,” he writes:
There’s a sense through which love’s fact is proved by its finish, by what it turns into in us, and what we, by advantage of affection, turn out to be. However love, like religion, happens within the innermost recesses of an individual’s spirit, and we will see solely inward on this regard, and never very clearly.
With a watch to his personal expertise, he considers how any giant and luminous love transcends the private — the realm of the self — and unselves us into the sacred:
I didn’t know what love was till I encountered one which stored opening and opening and opening. And till I acknowledged that what that love was opening onto, and into, was God… In any real love — a mom’s for her little one, a husband’s for his spouse, a pal’s for a pal — there’s an extra power that all the time desires to be in movement. Furthermore, it appears to maneuver not merely from one particular person to a different however by way of them, towards one thing else… This is the reason we could be so baffled and overwhelmed by such love… It desires to be greater than it’s; it cries out inside us to make it greater than it’s. And what it’s crying out for, lastly, is its essence and origin: God.
Wiman’s God is the normal Christian God, however the sentiment holds true — and even perhaps more true — if the phrase have been thriller. Surrendering to it — to this transcendent not-knowing that beckons past the bounds of what we will maintain on to — could be the essence of affection. Wiman writes:
Love, which awakens our souls and to which we cling like the luxurious mortal creatures that we’re, asks us to let it go, to let it’s greater than it’s… We really feel love depart us in unthreatening methods. We really feel it reenter us without delay extra actually and weirder, like a easy kiss that has a chew of starlight to it.
Maybe this religious dimension of affection stems from a easy equivalence: At its core, love is the standard of consideration we confer upon one other; and as Simone Weil noticed in her timeless meditation on the character of grace, “consideration, taken to its highest diploma, is similar factor as prayer.” All of affection’s gravity and all of its grace are present in our acts of consideration.
