THE WOUNDED GIFT

THE WOUNDED GIFT

One of the great powers of love is balance; it helps us towards transfiguration. When two people come together, an ancient circle closes between them. They also come to each other not with empty hands, but with hands full of gifts for each other. Often these are wounded gifts; this awakens the dimension of healing within love. When you really love someone, you shine the light of your soul on him or her. We know from nature that sunlight brings everything to growth. If you look at flowers early on a spring morning, they are all closed. When the light of the sun catches them, they trustingly open out and give themselves to the new light.

When you love someone who is very hurt, one of the worst things you can do is to directly address the hurt and make an issue of it. A strange dynamic comes alive in the soul if you make something into an issue. It becomes a habit and keeps recurring in a pattern. Frequently it is better simply to acknowledge that there is a wound there, but then stay away from it. Every chance you get, shine the gentle light of the soul in on the wound. It is helpful to remember that there are ancient resources of renewal and refreshment in the circle of love that brings and holds you both together. The destiny of your love is never merely dependent on the fragile resources of your separate subjectivities. You can invoke the healing of the third force of light between you; this can bring forgiveness, consolation and healing in stony times.

When you love someone it is destructive to keep scraping at the clay of your belonging. There is much to recommend in not interfering with you love. Two people who love each other should never feel called to explain to an outside party why they lover each other, or why it is that they belong together. The place where they belong is a secret place. Their souls know why they are together. If you keep interfering with your connection with your Other, your lover, your anam cara, you gradually begin to force a distance between you. There is this wonderful two-line poem from Thom Gunn called ‘Jamesian’. Henry James is the most precise and utterly nuanced of novelists. He described things in such fine detail and from so many different angles. Such insidious analysis can become obsessive and destructive of the lyrical presence of love.