A cruel and radiant beauty

We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren. He who does not love abides in death. (1 John 3:14)

I should be grateful, but I’m not much good at being thankful for pain and worry. I could say circumstances produced the hollow chill in my heart that refuses remedy. But that’s not true.

The malady is deeper, elemental. Love.

You never know how much you love someone until something happens that threatens to upend their life, their future, their safety, their happiness. Then, you discover the cruel and radiant beauty smoldering in the inmost chamber of your heart.

In that holy burning, you feel what it is to be alive, filled with an undeniable love long seeded in the soil of your soul, now grown so great that you no longer possess it. It possesses you. You … or some significant part of you … has become love.

Why would we want it any other way? Who are we if not the loves we love, the loves that carry us beyond ourselves to ache and work and worry and give our hearts away, there to discover that this is life, the only kind of life worthy of the name.

I most admire those, like Jesus, who loved … and loved to their end, fully, completely, so that at the end there was no more left to give, or so it seemed. I’ve known more than my share of this, the truest of all beauties.

I pray to find my place among such souls, knowing that my weak heart has a long way to go, if ever to shine with the radiance of the love that embraces pain with gratitude for the beauty of loving.

But here I am, walking love’s stony path, like so many others in so many places, praying and feeling helpless to soothe the soul and grant safe harbor to another heart as precious to me as my own.

This is the way the school of love works—a hidden, excruciatingly slow process of microscopic movement out of slavery to self and into love’s radiant light. The moment we risk loving anyone we enter a curriculum laced with the lilt of laughter and the anxiety of hoping that all will be well, fully aware that there are no guarantees.

Except love, of course. For in the cruel and radiant beauty of loving, we abide in the Love who draws us from death to life, perhaps especially when the days are hard and the nights are long.