Fruitful Muse #15

The Sanity of Love

(03.10.24)

My recent experience of being on retreat allowed me to take a step back

from my entanglements and to review my approach to life as it is, rather than as I would like to manipulate it to be. When I don’t live up to my own mental ideas of who or what I think I should be, I can become frustrated, angry, dispirited. When the people in my household or at work refuse to conform their behaviours to my expectations and hopes … When the circumstances of my life elude my capacity for alignment and perfection … I can make myself quite miserable.

 

Resentment, self-pity, rumination, the rehearsal of hurts and disappointments may become the daily bread of a toxic meditation. In the meantime, beautiful things are passing me by, and I am missing out of the joy of being. Clearly, I am insane but have no current awareness of my insanity. Why wont everything within me and around me do what I want it to?

There is an antidote: “Love covers a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8). As I move into prayer, I move into a more conscious proximity to Love. In this proximity I wake up and recognise that my desire for complete order and perfection is a mental construct that is not reality. I realise that this desire, masquerading as piety and reasonableness, is in fact, a disordered attachment. A refusal to be in relationship with my actual self, the people in my world as autonomous beings, not projections of my own ego. The circumstances of my life, a force of their own, like the ocean, a wave or current to navigate, never control. Sanity returns in the movement of love as I recognise that love frees me to be in relationship with life as it is, I am released from the burden of control and of trying to make things conform to my mental image of what ‘should be’. Love invites me to enter the rest of faith, the simple trust in the God at work in love in me and through me and present to each and every circumstance of my life. God knows how all this is going to work out, and love tells me that that is enough.

Peace.

 

A message from the Author
Imagine an eagle soaring high above the earth. This beautiful creature represents the transcendent perspective and speaks to us of the freedom to look at our lives differently and from the perspective of compassion and mercy. What would it look like for you at this time to let go of the entanglements that hold you grounded and limit your view of life? Do you sense and invitation in the reading about the sanity of love? Take a moment to imagine your self as a person of mercy, forgiveness and acceptance, towards yourself, towards others, towards the events of your life, its past and present. What do you feel? How do these feelings instruct your way of being and your enjoyment of life? If the reading were a message to you from God what would it be saying or what would you like God to be saying to you through these words?
Dr Phil Daughtry