Rita Sherma Convergence Spirituality: God Beyond Religion

All the self-help books and spiritual teachings on love harp on how to love. We are asked to trust that offering perfect love will naturally attract a loving response. Every psychologist knows this is, at best, half the story. An offering of complete and wholesome love, may or may not be reciprocated. Worse, it may be reciprocated and then, withdrawn. When true and nurturing love does not elicit an answering response, it becomes self-sacrificial love because the I versus You dichotomy cannot be dissolved from one direction alone. What can we lean from the pain and trauma of imperfect love?

Should we allow the disillusionment and sadness to destroy our trust and instill bitterness in our hearts? Clearly, NO, because that would stunt our capacity to grow, and constrain our ability to find genuine love. Should we continue to love the one who has caused our pain? YES, we should continue to love because love is our soul’s ultimate calling. But the form of love should change—it must become an impersonal, agapic, compassionate love for another human being, who is also a child of God and struggling, or stumbling, towards growth in her/his own way.

Should we trust that the experience of (what has now become) a self-sacrificial relationship, which diminishes our sense of worth, will lead us to greater growth? Here the answer must be NO, because we are then enabling the diminution of both our humanity and that of our loved one by being complicit in her/his selfishness (which leads away from growth), and her/his diminishment of another (which truncates her/his own humanity).

Neediness and total dependence is deadening to love. Ideal, wholesome love arises from the higher aspect of the self that is pure Spirit. At the same time, however, we must recognize that we are not only Spirit; we are also physical and mental beings—hearts and minds. As such, there are fundamental needs that must be met for us to flourish and not merely survive. Empathetic love is one of these needs.

Love need not be “romantic”—everything I mention here pertains equally to all forms of love. And it is important to remember that we must do all we can to ignite and nurture a dynamic relationship ourselves before we can even begin to decide if reciprocal love is moving our way or not.

When it is clear, however, that you are faced with an unempathetic, unresponsive individual who has claims on your heart, you are not helping them when you enable their corrosion as human beings by facilitating their selfishness. The right response is to compassionately, but firmly, express your concerns to the loved one who is supposed to nourish and support you. If they are unable, or unwilling, to support the fundamental requirements of love, it is time to expand your heart enough to wish them growth—and then, to walk away from the emotional connection even if you remain in contact with the individual.

Throughout this difficult process, enlarge your kindness towards yourself, while holding your own pain in deep understanding and compassion, until the warmth of your attention to the trauma dissolves the suffering.

Everything that we experience, everyone that we encounter, whether pleasant or unpleasant, can spur growth within us. Growth is the enlargement of our understanding, the expansion of our hearts, the blossoming of our full awareness. Love is a potent vehicle for our growth.

But what is love? First let us look at what love is not. Love is not a feeling. If the thoughts, words, actions of love are offered to the beloved when we “feel like it,” it isn’t love. Love is a dedication. It is a commitment to an altered state of being which flows out of the understanding that we must try to do all that is in our power to enhance the happiness of our beloved if we are to have even a shot at happiness ourselves. Love is the “State of No Sacrifice” because all our “sacrifices” on behalf of the beloved is really for ourselves as love, in its fullness, dissolves the “I versus You” distinction.

not is neediness. Love is a two-fold capacity. It comprises the ability to nurture, support, enjoy, and enfold, but also to offer sufficient freedom for the other person to manifest their uniqueness and purpose. Needy, unwholesome love is like a vine that clings to a tree and chokes the life out of it. Wholesome love is like two oak trees that grow strong beside each other, with enough space for both to flourish, their branches and leaves entwined as they soar towards the sky.

Third, love is not a structure that, once in place, pretty much stays the same with a bit of maintenance now and then. Love is a delicate plant that needs unceasing care and attention. When the bestowal of that attention is a pleasure and a privilege, know that you are truly in love.

Finally, love is not a solo sport. It is a fluid dance. Love needs the equal engagement of both participants. They don’t necessarily have identical roles, nor do they have to make the same moves, but there must be a back and forth. The dance of love requires practice and effort. When love is a perfect dance and the steps are in unison, it can take us to heaven’s door. When love is one-sided, and effort is uni-directional, it can play havoc with our lives. Love, unreciprocated, unanswered, can lead to self-destructive behavior–it can lead us towards the road to perdition.

The most widely circulated form of The Serenity Prayer, thought to have been written by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, is as follows:

God grant me the Serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
and Wisdom to know the difference.

Acceptance is a wonderful thing and the prayer is a beautiful thought. The problem arises in putting it into action. There are three kinds of actions we can take to “change the things we can change”:

1. Mental action (thought).
2. Communicative action (word).
3. Physical action (deed).

But there is a fourth type of action that we can undertake to change the things that seem beyond our capacity to change, and that is spiritual action. By “spiritual action,” I don’t mean petitionary prayer. This refers to the kind of begging, cringing, asking, and beseeching that passes for prayer all over the world.

Spiritual action—the kind that can change the things that you think you “cannot change”—requires commitment to sacred practices (praxis) that can endow you with discipline over your mind, body, and character, so that you can take the entire energy of your being and focus it on God.

God’s answering response is “grace” and with grace, many things are possible that are not attainable simply through “thought, word, and deed.”

Many forms of sacred practices were common in the early centuries of Christian history. But with increasing institutionalization and escalation of control by the clerical establishment, the wonders achieved by the desert fathers, and lay women saints, began to become the stuff of legends.

But now that the whole world’s wisdom is open to us, we can find our way back once again to the fourth type of action, spiritual action, by opening our minds, hearts, and souls, to an immersion in praxis, or systematic sacred practice.

Praxis takes us beyond what we can learn from reading and praying, or from preachings and teachings, to a place where we encounter our own intuitive knowing and inner capacity to change the things we think we cannot change.