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When we extend ourselves, our self enters new
and unfamiliar territory. It becomes a new and different self. We do
things we are not accustomed to doing. We change.
The experience of change, or unaccustomed
activity, of being on unfamiliar ground, or of doing things
differently is frightening. It has always been and will always be.
People handle their fear of change in different ways, but the fear
is inescapable if they are to change.
Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the
making of action in spite of fear, the moving out against the
resistance engendered by our fear, into the unknown and into the
future.
On some level, spiritual growth, and therefore
love, always requires courage and involves risk.
Loss
We have said that cathexis is not love, that
love transcends cathexis. This is true, but love requires cathexis
for a beginning. We can only love that which is important to us.
But, with cathexis there is always the risk of loss or rejection. If
you move out towards another person, there is always the risk they
will move away from you, leaving you more painfully alone than you
were before. Love anything that lives and it will die. Trust anybody
and you may be hurt. Depend on anyone and they may let you down. The
price of cathexis is pain.
If someone is determined not to risk pain, they
must do without many things: having children; getting married; the
ecstasy of sex; the hope of ambition; friendship - all that makes
life alive, meaningful and significant. Move out or grow in any
dimension and pain as well as joy will be your reward. A full life
will be full of pain. But the only alternative is not to live fully
or not to live at all.
The essence of life is change, a panoply of
growth and decay. Elect life and growth and you elect change and the
prospect of death. If we can live with the knowledge that death is
our constant companion then death can be come our ally, still
fearsome, but continually a source of wise counsel. With death's
counsel, the constant awareness of the limit of our time to live and
love, we can always be guided to make the best use of our time and
to live life to the fullest. But if we are unwilling to fully face
the fearsome presence of death we deprive ourselves of its counsel
and cannot possibly live or love with clarity. When we shy away from
death, the ever changing nature of things, we inevitably shy away
from life.
Independence
The more lovingly we live our lives, the more
risks we take. Of the thousands, maybe millions, of risks we can
take in a life time the greatest is the risk of growing up.
Growing up is the act of stepping from
childhood into adulthood. Actually, it is more of a fearful leap
than a step. It is a leap that many people never really take in
their lifetimes. Though they may outwardly appear to be adults, even
successful adults, perhaps the majority of "grown-ups" remain until
their death psychologically children who have never truly separated
themselves from their parents and the power that their parents have
over them.
The process of growing up usually occurs very
gradually with multiple little leaps into the unknown. If you watch
even the healthiest of children you will see not only an eagerness
to risk new adult activities, but also, side by side, a reluctance,
a shrinking back, a clinging to the safe and familiar, a holding
onto dependency and childhood. Moreover, on more or less subtle
levels, you can find this same ambivalence in an adult, including
yourself, with the elderly particularly tending to cling to the old,
known and familiar.
Among all the little leaps we might take, there
are also some enormous ones. Many never take any of these
potentially enormous leaps, and consequentially many do not really
grow up at all.
What has this business of growing up to do with
love, apart from the extension of the self involved in loving being
the enlargement of the self into a new dimension? The answer is that
major changes are acts of self-love.
Only when we have taken the leap into the
unknown of total self-hood, psychological independence and unique
individuality are we free to proceed along the still higher paths of
spiritual growth and free to manifest love in its greatest
dimensions.
As long as we marry, enter a career, or have
children to satisfy our parents or the expectations of anyone else,
including society as a whole, the commitment, by its very nature,
will be a hollow one. As long as we love our children because we are
expected to behave in a loving manner towards them, then as parents
we will be insensitive to the more subtle needs of our children and
unable to express our love in the most responsive, most important
way.
The highest forms of love are inevitably
totally free choices and not acts of conformity.
Commitment
Whether it be shallow or not, commitment is the
foundation of any genuinely loving relationship. Frequently we are
not consciously aware of the immensity of the risk involved in
making a deep commitment. Anyone who is truly concerned for the
spiritual growth of another knows, consciously or instinctively,
that he or she can significantly foster that growth only through a
relationship of constancy. Children cannot grow to psychological
maturity in an atmosphere of unpredictability, haunted by the
spectre of abandonment. Couples cannot resolve in any healthy way
the universal issues of marriage - dependency and independence,
dominance and submission, freedom and fidelity, for example -
without the security of knowing that the act of struggling over
these issues will not itself destroy the relationship.
Issues of commitment are crucial in the course
of psychotherapy. Character disordered individuals lack
understanding of what commitment is all about and tend to form only
shallow commitments. When their disorders are severe, these
individuals seem to lack totally the capacity to form commitments at
all. Neurotics, on the other hand, are generally aware of the nature
of the commitment but are frequently paralysed by the fear of it.
Commitment is the cornerstone of the
psychotherapeutic relationship. For basic healing to take place it
is necessary for the psychotherapist to bring to his or her
relationship with a new client the same high degree of commitment
that genuinely loving parents bring to their children. If the
therapist's commitment is sufficient, then usually, although not
inevitably, the client will respond with a developing commitment of
his or her own, a commitment to the therapist and to the therapy
itself. The point at which the client begins to demonstrate this
commitment is the turning point of the therapy. But, reach it they
must if they are to be healed. The risk of commitment to therapy is
not only the risk of commitment itself but also the risk of
self-confrontation and change.
For the therapist, it is a wonderful moment of
relief and joy when the they realise that the client has assumed the
risk of commitment and therefore that the therapy will succeed.
Confrontation
Possibly the greatest risk of love is the risk
of exercising power with humility - the act of loving confrontation.
Most criticism and confrontation, usually made impulsively in anger
or annoyance, does more to increase the amount of confusion in the
world than the amount of enlightenment.
For the truly loving person, the act of
criticism or confrontation does not come easily; it is evident to
such a person that the act has great potential for arrogance.
Genuine love recognises and respects the unique
individuality and separate identity of the other person. However,
reality is that there are times in life when one person will know
better than the other what is good for the other and is in a
position of superior knowledge or wisdom in regard to the matter at
hand. Under these circumstances, the wiser of the two does have an
obligation, out of loving concern for the spiritual growth of the
other, to confront the other with the problem. The loving person is
therefore frequently in a dilemma: caught between a loving respect
for the beloved's own path in life; and, a responsibility to
exercise loving leadership when the beloved seems to need such
leadership.
This dilemma can only be resolved by
painstaking self-scrutiny in which the lover examines stringently
the worth of his or her "wisdom" and the motives behind this need to
assume leadership. The self-scrutiny is the essence of humility or
meekness.
There are, then, two ways to confront or
criticise another person: with instinctive and spontaneous certainty
that we are right, or with a belief that we are probably right
arrived at through scrupulous self-doubting and self-examination.
The first is the way of arrogance; it is the most common way of
parents, spouses, teachers and people generally in their day to day
affairs; it is usually unsuccessful, producing more resentment and
other unintended effects than growth. The second is the way of
humility; it is not common, requiring as it does, a genuine
extension of ourselves; it is more likely to be successful, and it
is never likely to be destructive.
To fail to confront when confrontation is
required for the nurture of spiritual growth represents a failure to
love equally as much as does thoughtless criticism or condemnation
and other forms of uncaring. Mutual loving confrontation is a
significant part of all successful and meaningful human
relationships. Without it, the relationship is either unsuccessful
or shallow.
To confront or criticise is a form of
exercising leadership or power. Loving people must concern
themselves with this art, for if we desire the nurture of another's
spiritual growth, then we must concern ourselves with the most
effective way to accomplish this in any given instance.
To confront someone with something he or she
cannot handle will at best be a waste of time and likely to have a
deleterious effect. If we want to be heard we must speak in a
language the listener can understand and on a level at which the
listener is capable of operating. If we are to love we must extend
ourselves to adjust our communication to the capacities of our
beloved.
What is this about the risk involved? The
problem is that the more loving one is, the more humble one is; yet
the more humble one is, the more one is awed by the potential for
arrogance in exercising power. Who am I to influence the course of
human events? Who gives me the right to believe in my own
understanding and then to presume to exert my will upon the world?
Who am I to play God? That is the risk. For whenever we exercise
power we are attempting to influence the course of the world, of
humanity, and we are therefore playing God.
But those who truly love and work for the
wisdom that love requires are aware that they are playing God. They
know that there is no alternative except inaction and impotence.
Love compels us to play God with full consciousness of the enormity
of the fact that that is just what we are doing. With this
consciousness, the loving person assumes the responsibility of
attempting to be God and not to carelessly play God; to fulfil God's
will without mistake. We arrive, then, at yet another paradox: only
out of the humility of love can humans dare to be God.
Personal Discipline &
Problem Solving
01 Problems & Pain
02 Delaying Gratification
03 Acceptance of Responsibility
04 Dedication to the Truth
05 Balancing
Love & Relationships
06 What is Love?
07 What Love is Not
08 The Work of Love
09 The Risks of Love
10 Love and Psychotherapy
Personal & Spiritual Growth
11 Personal & Spiritual
Growth
12 The Phenomena of Grace (1)
13 The Phenomena of Grace (2)
14 God - The Alpha & The Omega
15 Resistance to Grace
16 Welcoming Grace
Appendix