LOVE and BEAUTY
The worst pain is not to be able to love. The saints and mystics who were honest admitted that to love everything and everyone was sheer joy and pleasure and comfort and ease and peace. It is the most pleasurable thing in the world to love, it is the most 'selfish' in one sense.
When I see a mother's love for her children, I do not see self-sacrifice, but a ravenous need to nurture. When satisfied, joy and pleasure and ease and comfort and peace.
There is no reason to praise the saint or the mother for their ability to love so completely and intensely. Rather, we need to congratulate them on their good luck to be able to love. Mozel Tov!
It frees you from the prison of a limited world and a limited ego drowning in its own anxieties and fears, its sense that it will never get what it wants, because as soon as it gets what it thinks it wants, another want comes, and another. Comfort for one's self? Always fragile. The love of others for one's self? Always uncertain. Always seemingly dependent on what we do, what we are.
So do not walk in awe or pity or admiration of those who love so completely that they willingly give up their lives for those they love. They are merely 'lucky' - a gift has fallen on them, and they had the good sense to receive it.
For so many of us, this gift that falls from Heaven or hell or whatever - we haven't been able to receive it, accept it.
And talk not to me of special talents, deep wisdom and insight in saints and mothers. The ability to love requires no special talent or intelligence. We know this because we see so many ordinary people who have this ability. Saints and mothers are only special because they are so ideally normal in their ability to love, unlike many like me who live in the prison of their ego most of the time.
So why does our 'culture' goad us into feeling and thinking that a successful life is won only by the strong, the intelligent, the talented, the ambitious, the imaginative, the WINNERS?
Because our 'culture' is sick unto death, because it stinks of the most profound putrefaction, just to think of its corruption and decadence makes me choke with disgust, makes the blood rise in me.
Our 'culture' killed our son, and it murders so many souls, breaks the spirit of so many of us, reduces us to whining, moaning (as I am here now doing), existential hypochondriacs.
Neil Postman reminded us that that we know (and 'love' by implication) the faces and 'personalities' of our favourite celebrities better than those of our neighbours. Many of us no longer live in a real world of love for real people.
BEAUTY
I have a friend who sees spirits and spirit guides. He says that this world is beautiful, the best of all possible worlds (he is a fan of Leibniz), no matter the ugliness of all that which is 'wrong', from the built environment that bludgeons us into deep states of alienation and a brutalised inability to SEE this environment for what it is - to all else that is wrong.
There is a point to his madness: he is at peace. He loves everything.
I favour another route. The Chasid version of the kabbalah. I attempt a summary here, that will certainly have mistakes:
There is in this world a deep wrongness, a heavy darkness, evil if you like. And the strongest Divine sparks have exploded outwards from the centre - G-d if you like - into the farthest regions of darkness and wrongness. Thus the darker the place or being, the stronger the spark that is in it. But this spark needs much help, not only from G-d in 'feminine' aspect (the Shekinah) but all of us, in order to transform that which is wrong and ugly into beauty and light.
Thus, it seems that it is imperative that we see the divine beauty struggling in evil to transform that evil into the highest good. And help it to emerge. In doing so, our own divine 'spark' will emerge. This is the purpose of all beings, all that exists. But each of us is unique. And we need, need, to fulfil that uniqueness in order to revive the sparks of beauty into full flame. At that point, the Chasidim say, the Messiah will come.
Mozel Tov!
Thanks Moe!