No Freedom Without Love
An Archangel in the Bema Vault of Hagia Sophia & Lamb of God - Basilica dei Santi Cosma e Damiano (Rome, Italy);
It doesn’t help to know everything in advance. But we have come to a stasis: we no longer know what to do right now. There is not much left to do on this crowded planet that can make a difference or resolve the pain.
I try to think what I might do that is good.
There is always prayer. But this is lonely work. Is there only lonely work left to be done in the age of individualisation?
Then one could move to where the lone eagle screeches on the high winds that sweep the skies, and some do and pioneer the art of un-doing as such.
We may well have arrived at that moment in time when all we can do effectively is let go. Accept all that you are born knowing; lament all that we cannot possibly know in this current epoch; and learn to tell the difference.
Then love can begin.
I was looking through an old (1988) book (by Mainstone – what’s in a name -) on the Hagia Sophia (Istanbul,Turkey) with black and white photos of the roofs and vaults of this place of congregation and worship, astounded to learn it had been built in a mere five years – in the 6th century (most medieval cathedrals took at least 40 years, and usually a full century to complete) – thanks to the will and power of Emperor Justinian, its patron.
As if protected by this massive monument I found myself falling into a deep musing. It included the spheres of music, or the zodiac belt, or the archangels themselves. Anyway, I heard myself mumble to myself:
- I have decided to learn everything from you, the one who can love the unloveable.
I felt how the more one speaks of the good evil can do the more transformative work one does.
←Wooden sign painted with a demon's face, China, 1801-1900 Credit: Science Museum, London
I saw how (so very) much had been put in place. I understood where the notion of pre-destination might have come from.
Like black butter the turgid frost melted onto our plane, which folded itself over, like a pancake - to incubate this too, as earth is the cradle for all manifestation.
All the time pancakes are being filled with this dripping from the stalactites of no-good hanging over us like swords of Damocles.
The darkness is nothing until it is wrapped up in a coccoon. There is fights itself into a beast and into a right old tiff at that. There it becomes a self. Then comes the time to unravel its casement or crack open its confines and like a livid genie it emerges concrete with a face set in fury.
Turning To New Horizons
Having spoken the words of my decision half-out loud (within myself, for I was in a libarary after all), I realised I would never be able to explain whom I was talking to. One of my readers might analyse the “you”, my new teacher, to be an alter ego, typical of an inner dialogue with one’s subconscious self. Another might recognise a similar conversation she had as a child with someone she might call Jesus. I am going to blindfold myself and spin myself around and stop to point at… some informative source in contact with my Higher Self, or Intuition (in the esoteric sense). Let’s make my conversational partner a spirit being, simply referred to as “he”.
I left the house asking a question: how can I leave all this negativity behind?
How to break the endless circle? Loop da loop. So sick of it.
What am I hoping to leave behind? Everything? This temporary phase my son is going through? My son? The obsessive compulsive autist he is? Will I be back once he has snapped to, come round, seen how detrimental his choice in girlfriend is? This non-choice which highlights little but his autism.
Am I, like the mother of a druggie, to leave them to shoot up till they hit rock bottom one final time?
Or may I finally leave him altogether? The personality with whom I am likely never to get along. The autism the first and foremost - irremovable - obstacle to affection between us. It is my false hope to forget its presence and believe in a binding love between us.
One last act of loving kindness, compassion, and good motherhood is to accept all that is autism. It asks me to make peace with it, to renounce the war on autism. Would this give me my freedom back (which cannot be around my son, or he'd freak out)? Is it permissible to leave him free to make as much mess in his life as he likes? It is not love that sets him free, but the lack of love. In his autism he values freedom over love!
We can learn from him that freedom without love is as ugly as sin.
The conversation resumed.
As I continued on my round of chores, I heard him ask, every so many steps again, the same question: who did you love when you were his mother? If you want to know who you want to leave now, answer me that. Who was your child? Who have you lost?
It is true:
I never had him.
I have lost nothing, there will be nothing coming back.
There is nothing to leave behind.
I cared for him.
I accepted guardianship. It was only ever temporary. It is over now.
Now I am consumed by hatred. Not of him, of me and my need to love so impossible to satisfy (I am crap at love or I would be loved!).
I want to self-destruct. But no, not really. I have hated myself enough to know that, now, I do not hate myself.
I am weary of the fury.
The game I entered was never fair. It was designed to go on for ever and fuel the rotations of evil. Was it some dark Karmic roulette? Nah, it was what it was, but it wasn't good. Only love can play at this game and sit it out till the wheel wears out.
That is the Manichaen stream that must reach the sea of the future.
So it is time to be busy with what I need to do; remember mantra 5.
To enter the Delta of Love.
To grow something good to eat there.
Hanuman revealing Rama and Sita in his heart. Watercolour drawing. →
Being unloveable is not a cruel state of being. It is a gift from God.
In Judaism, this was better understood, with their wrathful HaSchem.
People only ever change when they feel unloved.
That is the purpose of this most dreadful pain that is feeling unloveable.
I am not saying I loved my child so much he could not change! In fact, I wonder if I ever loved my child at all....who was there to love? It seems my child cannot feel love. Knows not the right measure of give and take to either cherish or outpour that which is love.
People say people with autism can love perfectly! I am sure many can. But I personally know many who describe bitterly how they cannot. I am sure this is not specific to the Syndrome of Autism, but I think it may ultimately "set" here; first wobbling in different degrees across the spectrum; eventually fixed as an outright mark of autism (maybe, by then quite acceptable in a robotic world).
I thought I didn't, but it turns out, now, that I loved my job as a mother. I miss it! Not in a muffin baking way or for the visits to the sandpit. Not because of birthdays or Christmas gatherings around the tree (there were no such activities and events that ever were recorded by my son).
I invested too much in making him "better" than his autism. I turn out to be in love with transformation. I am an alchemist, a magician, an artist who used my son to become a loving mother. I loved to love! I was in love with the idea of love. All I had to love, however, was my duty to him.
Only an insufficiency of love can motivate true and lasting change.
I cannot help but see (is it my dark mood?) that they who cannot feel what is enough love, will therefore never change significantly. Which is fine, there is always time. Till we run out.
We learn from eachother. Therefore we love. If we do not love, we cannot learn.
You cannot love a stone or the wind. Love is reciprocal or it is not love. Then again, maybe in their own way the pebble and the cloud love too....If God resides in them, after all....
Brother Moon, Sister Sun....
Love is in the making. It is mutual if only for a moment. It can exist in tiny exchanges, barely memorable moments: between you and your bus driver. Super that you are taking me home! Thank you for being my passenger. It does not have to be a cake for a pie; a good deed for a good turn. Tokens help to count out the time spent on love. It binds memories to hearts, which in turn fortifies these hearts.
Love precedes and supercedes all the memories, however. It is in the very opening and closing of your heart and the circulating. It is divine. It is the beat of a heart, the warming of the blood. It is I see you hear me; it is I am listening out for you.
Oh, maybe there have been moments even between my son and me.... He's always wanted to be a bus driver after all.
Love lasts when all else fades or prooves never to have been there at all.
Many, many, many of us will die unloved. This is a grave concern for those who love to love, with no love to mark this.
Or will who (or what thing or creature) we loved become (eternal?) memory vessles for our loving self?
Would I give up knowing anything for love?
Or is to love all there is to know? And must I know it to make love the highest knowable good?
I bet I wouldn't have any of these questions if I had simply loved all along.
Or did I not love in order to extract answers from these questions?
Or is it ALL THERE IS love and goodness and mercy tangled up into a ball? (A nightmare when you just want to knit a warm hat.)
There is another bet that presents itself: I bet my son is learning from his relationship. If not changing here and now (for he is learning impaired, and also there is no love, just drama, fear, and self-importance and self-assertion, exercises in survival). His spirit (or spirit companions) might well be extracting vast amounts of data on the consequences of the failing human heart (as intensified by the impediment of Autism)....
Musing along with you. Learning and stretching by way of your words.
I think of you as the very good skater, better than me. As a child, my mother would drop me off at the skating rink for all of the afternoon. I was there alone for hours. There was an older, blonde girl who could skate so fast and backwards and foot over foot and I'd set my eyes on her and attempt the same speed and moves and crash terribly at times on the curves. I'd brush myself off and even before standing again scan the crowd until I saw her, stand quickly and again skate after her, wanting to be better.
...Had you not watched her she would not have been that good.... To endorse might be what sets a mere mortal amongst the bodhisattvas... (B.t.w. now we are on the rink watch me, that pin-prick in the distance! Show me ice and I run away screaming, seriously, and that is embarrassing where I live....It's a different scream for icecream though...