It's Just Like That

For the most part the west conceptualizes spiritual and emotional resources as a type of personal thermostat with the promise that with well-honed effort and discipline one can establish,fix and control the outcome and trajectory of most experiences. Imagined as such we organize our lives to get the temperature right.  We pour an exhaustive amount of energy into achieving balance, equilibrium and a state of stability. Small adjustments here, larger adjustments there.  The endless pursuit of control.  There is a whole world of unconscious behaviors, impulses and neuro-conditioning that gets organized around this desire for control.  John O’Donohue was right, “it is our minds that make our lives so homeless”.

  

It is a cruel, disorienting and finally a merciful realization that the life of the spirit is a weak force. Love is a weak power – and sometimes feels like no power at all. Maybe that is its strength.  We want control,love whispers “surrender”; we demand “secured outcomes”,love points toward the path of full-involved participation; we crave probability love sings of possibilities. 


It is the weakness of love that harbors the hope of our transformation. And so our falling apart is not mere testament of our frailty, there is also a healing within it.  As a voice from the east says, “We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”