THE WAY TO LOVE

[Liberal Catholic]

THE WAY TO LOVE
By Father Anthony DeMello S.J.

Has it ever occurred to you that you can only love when you are alone?

What does it mean to love? It means to see a person, a thing, a
situation, as it really is and not as you imagine it to be, and to
give it the response it deserves.

You cannot love what you do not even see. And what prevents you from
seeing?

Your concepts, your categories, your prejudices and projections, your
needs and attachments, the labels you have drawn from your
conditioning and from your past experiences.

Seeing is the most arduous thing a human being can undertake. For it
calls for a disciplined, alert mind, whereas most people would much
rather lapse into mental laziness than take the trouble to see each
person and thing anew in present-moment freshness.

To drop your conditioning in order to see is arduous enough. But
seeing calls for something more painful still. The dropping of the
control that society exercises over you; a control whose tentacles
have penetrated to the very roots of your being, so that to drop it is
to tear yourself apart.

If you wish to understand this, think of a little child that is given
a taste for drugs. As the drug penetrates the body of the child, it
becomes addicted and its whole being cries out for the drug. To be
without the drug is so unbearable a torment that it seems preferable
to die.

Now this is exactly what society did to you when you were a child. You
were not allowed to enjoy the solid, nutritious food of life; work and
play and the company of people and the pleasures of the senses and the
mind. You were given a taste for the drug called Approval,
Appreciation, Attention, the drug called Success,
Prestige, Power.

Having got a taste for these things you became addicted and began to
dread their loss. You felt the criticism of others.
So you became cravenly dependent on people and lost your freedom.

Others now have the power to make you happy or miserable.

And much as you now hate the suffering this involves, you find
yourself completely helpless.
There is never a minute when, consciously or unconsciously, you are
not attuned to the reaction of others, marching to the drum of their
demands.

When you are ignored or disapproved of, you experience a loneliness so
unbearable that you crawl back to people to be for the comfort known
as Support, Encouragement, Reassurance.

To live with people in this state involves never-ending tension; but
to live without them brings the agony of loneliness.

You have lost your capacity to see them clearly as they are and to
respond to them accurately because mostly your perception of them is
clouded by your need to get your drug.

The consequence of all this is terrifying and inescapable: You have
become incapable of loving anyone or anything.

If you wish to love you must learn to see again. And if you wish to
see you must give up your drug. You must tear away from your being the
roots of society that have penetrated to the marrow.

You must drop out.

Externally everything will go on as before, you will continue to be in
the world, but no longer of it. And in your heart you will now be free
at last and utterly alone.

It is only in this aloneness, this utter solitude, that dependence and
desire will die, and the capacity to love is born.

For one no longer sees others as means to satisfy one's addiction.

Only someone who has attempted this knows the terror of the process.
It is like inviting yourself to die.

It is like asking the poor drug addcit to give up the only happiness
he has known and to replace it with a tasted for bread and fruit and
the clean fresh morning air and the sweetness of the water from the
mountain stream, while he is truggling to cope with his withdrawal
symptoms and with the emptiness that he experiences within himself now
that his drug has gone.

To his fevered mind nothing can fill the emptiness except his drug.

Can you imagine a life in which you refuse to enjoy a single word of
approval and appreciation, or to lean on someone's arm, in which you
depend on no one emotionally, so no has the power to make you happy or
miserable anymore; you refuse to need any particular person or to be
special to anyone or to call anyone your own?

Even the birds of the air have their nests and the foxes their holes,
but you will have nowhere to rest your head in your journey through
life.

If you ever get to this state you will at last know what it means to
see with a vision that is clear and unclouded by fear or desire. And
you will know what it means to love.

But to come to this land of love you have to pass through the pains of
death.

For to love person is to have died to the need for persons and to be
utterly alone.

How would you ever get there? By ceaseless awareness, and the infinite
patience and compassion that you would have for the drug addict.

It will also help you to undertake activities that you can do with
your whole being, activities that you so much love to do, that while
you are engaged in them, success or recognition or approval simply do
not mean a thing to you.

It wil help too if you return to Nature: Send the crowds away and go
up into the mountain and silently commune with trees and flowers and
animals and birds, with sea and sky and clouds and stars.

Then you will know that your heart has brought you into the vast
desert of solitude. There is no one there by y;our side, absolutely
alone.

At first it will seem unbearable, but that is only because you are
unaccustomed to aloneness.

But if you manage to stay there for a while the desert will suddenly
blossom into Love.

Your heart will burst into song. And it will be springtime forever.



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