Each infrequently, the curtain of consciousness we mistake for actuality components and we glimpse what glows past it.
Some name it thriller.
Some name it God.
Some discover it within the molecular construction of mycelium below a microscope.
Some within the shade 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 fully 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 part 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 Bright Abyss (public library). (As with Rumi, as with the gospels, one needn’t share Wiman’s explicit taste of religion to be moved by the religious reality in his writing.)
In consonance with the science of limbic revision and its haunting corollary that “who we’re and who we change into relies upon, partially, on whom we love,” he writes:
There’s a sense wherein love’s reality is proved by its finish, by what it turns into in us, and what we, by advantage of affection, change into. 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 massive 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 saved 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 good friend’s for a good friend — there’s an extra vitality that all the time needs to be in movement. Furthermore, it appears to maneuver not merely from one individual to a different however by them, towards one thing else… This is the reason we may be so baffled and overwhelmed by such love… It needs to be greater than it’s; it cries out within 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 standard Christian God, however the sentiment holds true — and even perhaps more true — if the phrase had been thriller. Surrendering to it — to this transcendent not-knowing that beckons past the bounds of what we will maintain on to — would 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 directly extra really and more unusual, 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 nature of grace, “consideration, taken to its highest diploma, is identical factor as prayer.” All of affection’s gravity and all of its grace are present in our acts of consideration.
