a talk a professor at SPU just forwarded to me given by David Brooks recently given at an annual conference called "The Gathering"...
"......When people fall in love, something opens up in them. A great passage I read about failing in love was written by a guy named Douglas Hofstadter, who is a mathematician at Indiana University. He was on sabbatical many years ago now with his wife, Carol, and their two kids who were then 5 and 3. And all at once Carol suffered a brain aneurysm and died. He kept her picture on the bureau of his room and he must have looked at it every day, but one day he looked at it with special attention and here’s what he wrote about seeing her face:
"I looked at her face, and I looked so deeply I felt I was behind her eyes. And all at once I found myself saying as tears flowed, that’s me, that’s me. And those simple words brought back many thoughts that I had had before about the fusion of our souls into one higher-level entity. About the fact that at the core of both our souls lay our identical hopes and dreams for our children. About the notion that those hopes are not separate or distinct hopes, but were just one hope. One clear thing that defined us both. That welded us into a unit. The kind of unit I would dimly imagine before being married and having children. I realized that though Carol had died, that core piece of her had not died at all. But that it had lived on very determinedly in my brain."
So the first thing love does is it humbles us. It reminds us we are not even in control of ourselves. It’s like an invading army that reorganizes your sleep patterns, your thoughts, your emotions, and is the kind of invading army you welcome and you want to be invaded by.
The second thing it does is it decenters the self. The Adam One world your centered on yourself. But a person in love finds the center of his or her life is not inside oneself. It is outside in the soul of the beloved. The ultimate riches are outside and not inside.
Many writers have noted that love illuminates the distinction between giving and receiving. Montaigne had a passage which I think C.S. Lewis sort of stole…where he said, “The person who allows a friend to give a favor is doing the most favor. By giving the friend the pleasure of being able to give that favor.”
Because the souls are merged.
The third thing love does, is that it opens up ground. Love is like a plow opening up hard ground and allowing many other loves to grow. Self-control is a muscle. If you use it a lot, you use it up. Love is the reverse. The more you love, the more you are capable of loving. And so many people fall in love and through that love discover other loves.
And finally, love leads to holiness. One of my heroes is a woman named Dorothy Day, who wrote a great book called, “The Long Loneliness,” in which she describes giving birth to her daughter. And one of the things she said in that book after she described childbirth very grossly, but vividly. And she said, “If I had painted the greatest painting, if I had sculpted the greatest sculpture or written the greatest symphony, I could not have felt the more exalted creator than when I did when they placed my child in my arms. And with that came a need to worship and to adore.”
And so it was with the birth of her daughter that her eye turns heavenward. That’s the motion of love. First, decentered. First, humbled. Down to the bottom, you can’t even control yourself. And then upward, heavenly. It’s down and up. And that’s what love does.
It’s also the shape of suffering. The second activity. When people think about their future, they’re often thinking about happiness. What can I do that will make me happy? But when you look in the past, and think about the things that formed you, it’s rarely the happy moments, it’s the moments of suffering. So we shoot for happiness, but we’re formed by suffering.
Now it should be said there’s nothing intrinsically noble about suffering. If it’s not connected to any larger transcendent purpose, it just dehumanizes people and shrinks them. But if it’s connected to some greater design, people are clearly ennobled by it. Think of Franklin Roosevelt when he got polio. A shallow guy who became a much deeper and greater person after the polio.
The big thing suffering does is that it drags you deeper into yourself. Paul Tillich, the great theologian, wrote that people who endure suffering are taken between the routine busyness of life and forced to confront the fact that they are not who they believed themselves to be. The pain of suffering, whether it’s in composing a work or losing a loved one, smashes through the bottom floor of what they thought was their soul, revealing a cavity, and then it smashes through the floor of that, revealing another cavity and down and down and down.
So it digs you out. And opens up space. It shatters the illusions of self-mastery and when you’re suffering, you can’t control your suffering, you can’t even control yourself. And when you heal, that also feels magical. Like nothing that you did.
Suffering teaches gratitude. When you’re on top of the world, you think that people love you, well, you deserve it. But when you are suffering, you realize that love is unearned.
Suffering also, like love, points to holiness. People have suffered often and almost always have this sense of calling. When people lose a child, say, they don’t say, “Well, I had two years where I had low pleasure. I should compensate by going to a lot of parties so I can get high pleasure and balance off my hedonic account.” They do not say that. They want to turn the suffering into holiness, so they create a foundation. Or they transform their lives. People don’t heal from suffering. They come out changed. So it’s the same u-shaped curve. What Soloveitchik called “advance retreating advance.”
The third thing everyone I think in the secular world also experiences is grace. Now in this world, in this room, you may think how can a secular person experience grace? But I am telling you, everyone does. It may have different words, it may have less discreet meaning but everyone has the feeling sometimes that they get better than they deserve. You get a stroke, and people are there to care for you. You get fired and the community rallies around you. You suffer trauma and unexpected strangers are there for you. And you feel – you may not feel if you are secular – salvation sanctity, but you feel accepted.
Tillich again has a great essay on this. “Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being. Our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when year after year the longing for perfection of life does not appear. When old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades. When despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into ur darkness and it is through, it is though a voice were saying, “You are accepted. You are accepted. Accepted by that which is greater than you, and in the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now. Perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now. Perhaps you will do much later. Do not seek for anything. Do not perform for anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted. If that happens to us, we experience grace. After such an experience, we may not be better than before. We may not believe more than before, but everything is transformed. Nothing is demanded of this experience. No religious or moral intellectual presupposition. Nothing but acceptance."
-David Brooks
more at http://thegathering.com/e-updates/transcript-david-brooks-gathering-2014/
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