Peter’s blog for January 2014

 The one riddle, the one great enterprise in this world is to learn how to love and keep loving. Richard Selig

 

 The film that was judged to be the best  of the year at the Cannes film festival tells the story of two women called Emma and Adele who are drawn to each other. In their relationship Emma is the senior, dominant partner: better educated, more worldly and higher up the social scale. Adele who is in her final year at school and aims to become a teacher is from a humbler and more conservative background. It soon becomes obvious that Emma’s main interest is her career and that she is willing to sacrifice her relationship with Adele for it. Even though Adele goes on to become a teacher her main interest in life is her relationship with Emma that she pursues with a love whose growth becomes the main focus of the film. We witness in her the extraordinary experience Neil Diamond sings of in the song, I’m A Believer:

 I thought love was only true in fairy tales
Meant for someone else, but not for me
Love was out to get me
That’s the way it seemed
Disappointment haunted all my dreams
Then I saw her face, now I’m a believer
Not a trace of doubt in my mind
I’m in love and I’m a believer
I couldn’t leave her if I tried.

 

The Life of Adele
The French title of the film is, The Life of Adele: Chapter 1 and 2 and these two chapters could be entitled Initiation and Experience. When Adele and Emma first meet they are instantly drawn to each other and Emma who is a number of years older dominates as she initiates Adele into the world of love and relationships.

However, soon after the initial passion that characterises the early stages of their relationship, a passion that is portrayed in all its beauty, it becomes obvious that Emma cannot maintain their relationship or take it on to the next stage that the intensity of their love is designed to move them towards. We realise that Emma has not got the will or the ability to make their love last because her career has too much of a hold on her heart.

Soon after the cracks first appear in their relationship Emma does something that would normally shatter a relationship. When Emma wrongly suspects that Adele has been unfaithful to her, she, in a fit of violent rage, abuses Adele in language that is as ferociously cruel and destructive as any I have witnessed on screen. It is in Adele’s reaction to this that we see the initial stage of the growth of a love that dominates the rest of the film. Hers is a love that withstands the rejection of Emma and her permanent withdrawal from their relationship.

 

Love refined as in a fire
It is in this fire of adversity that Adele’s love is refined and becomes strikingly beautiful. We see this especially in the film’s final sequence when Adele goes along to an exhibition of Emma’s paintings. All we know at the end as she walks away is that Adele’s is a love that has been moulded by adversity into something deep and permanent and that nobody can take that utterly transforming experience from her. We may feel a sense of sadness for her that a relationship which promised so much is in one sense ended. However, what she has learned from it has not and this on reflection is seen to have a unique beauty that belongs especially to a passionate love that lasts and deepens and so becomes capable of the intimacy that belongs to friendship. From one point of view we see Adele’s very ordinary affection for the young children she teaches in her sensitivity, acceptance, appreciation and concern for them. From another viewpoint she has an extraordinary capacity for passionate love, one that lasts and deepens. This capacity to fall in love “in a quite absolute, final way” is expressed in the words of someone we might not expect to speak about passionate love or falling in love in this way.

 

“Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything”
Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything. (Pedro Arrupe S J)

The film is about ‘being in love’ or about what I will call passionate love and where it is designed to take us. I learned a lot about this from C.S. Lewis’ book Four Loves. In it he examines what the Greeks called “eros” which is the name they gave to what we call intimate, passionate, romantic love or to the being in love experience. They gave the name “storge” to what we call familial love or affection, the word “philia” to w hat we call friendship and the word “agape” to what we call “selfless love” or charity.

 

The roots that intertwine
Passionate love plays a key role among these loves in that it takes the affection we receive a gift of as children and gives it to another. There is an intensity about this giving that engages our whole self, body, soul, heart and mind and centres it on another person. In other words, passionate love is the catalyst that can transform us from self-centred adolescents into other-centred adults. What passionate love is and is not is wonderfully expressed in Dr Janis’ advice to his daughter in the novel, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because that is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion,… That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two. But sometimes the petals fall away and the roots have not entwined. Imagine giving up your home and your people, only to discover after six months, a year, three years, that the trees had no roots and have fallen over. Imagine the desolation. Imagine the imprisonment.

Where passionate love takes us
Although there is an obvious sexual dimension that we tend to identify passionate love with, the main thrust of its intensity is to involve our whole person, memory, imagination, body, soul, heart and mind in making this kind of love last and in deepening it. Its ultimate objective is to find fulfilment in friendship or in a mutual sharing of our whole self. This friendship that passionate love seeks to find fulfilment in is a very difficult achievement as it involves sharing or making known our whole self. To do this we have to come to terms with or accept how limited and sinful we all are and at the same time learn to appreciate how immensely gifted each of us is. However, this demands a lot of energy and resourcefulness that are difficult to find time for. This is especially so as we belong to a culture which is so addicted to what is urgent that it leaves us little time for what we know in our bones is important. Even so, passionate love remains a powerful source of energy for growth.

Romantic love is the single greatest energy system in the Western psyche. In our culture it has supplanted religion as the arena in which men and woman seek meaning transcendence, wholeness and ecstasy. (Robert Johnson, The Psychology of Romantic Love)

 

Three illusions
Because we cannot make the time to answer the true call of passionate love we easily fall victim to three illusions. These are like shortcuts we take to benefit from some aspects of passionate love while avoiding full responsibility for all that it has to offer us.

The first of these illusions tends to identify passionate love with the physical and emotional side of it and fails to make room for the glimpses of the other’s goodness and beauty and for the convictions that some of these glimpses gradually develop into. The growth of these glimpses into convictions is a slow and inconspicuous one so that it is difficult to make space in our day to notice, articulate and grow to believe in them. It is, however, precisely this that we are being asked to do when we feel physically and emotionally at a distance from each other. We are invited to rediscover the goodness and beauty we initially found in the person we fell in love with.

A second illusion that stunts the growth of our relationships emerges when we neglect or repress the physical and emotional side of our relationships. When for cultural or religious reasons or out of laziness we fail to cultivate the physical and emotional side of a relationship it tends to dry up and become impoverished.

The third illusion manifests itself when people ask each other to realise their dream by providing a love that is beyond our capacity as limited and sinful human beings to provide. Nobody can realise our dream for us as we each must take responsibility for going on the inner journey on which we realise it. It is an unfair burden to lay on another person when we ask him or her to realise our dream of a love, an intimacy and a joy that is full and complete. They are sure to disappoint us as in the end it is only God can give us this fullness of life that the Bible calls peace. It is something God plans and passionately wants for each of us.

 

A plan for your peace
The prophet Jeremiah spoke of this when he revealed God’s plan for our peace and Jesus spoke of it too as his special gift to us. It is his wish for us when we meet him on the way.

I have a plan in mind for you, a plan for your peace and not disaster, a future full of hope. If you seek me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me. (Jer 29:11)

My peace I leave you, my own peace I give you, a peace the world cannot give you, this is my gift to you.(Jn 14:27)

 When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. (Jn 20:19-21)

In his poem Arcadia Philip Sydney speaks of the dream of intimacy and joy that passionate love seeks to fulfil. This is the dream or fulfilment Jesus calls peace. So since we are in Paul’s words “the beloved of God” (Rom 1:7) we can hear the poem spoken to us by any of the three persons of the Trinity just as truly as by any human beloved.

My true love hath my heart, and I have his,
By just exchange, one for the other giv’n.
I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss:
There never was a better bargain driv’n.
His heart in me, keeps me and him in one,
My heart in him, his thoughts and senses guides:
He loves my heart, for once it was his own:

I cherish his, because in me it bides.
His heart his wound received from my sight:
My heart was wounded with his wounded heart,
For as from me, on him his hurt did light,
So still methought in me his hurt did smart;
Both equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss:
My true love hath my heart and I have his.
(Sir Philip Sidney)