The Wheel of Love

So in the prospect of a highly anticipated, too-slow-approaching event, I have been reading a book on the subject to which this event is concerned, marriage.  In so doing I have been particularly surprised with the descriptions Mr. Mike Mason (in his book, The Mystery of Marriage) has employed for his topic.  My surprise is concentrated most specifically in a reoccurring theme in the book.  I’ve always thought this was the case but Mr. Mason just has such a terrifyingly lucid way of putting things.  For convenience, I have italicized just a few of the many phrases I’ve found to be pointing toward this theme.

“One of the chief characteristics of love [, is that] it asks for everything. … The wedding is merely the beginning of a lifelong process of handing over absolutely everything, and not simply everything that one owns but everything that one is.  There is no one who is not broken by this process.  It is excruciating and inexorable, and no one can stand up to it.  Everyone gets broken on the wheel of love.  …  It is not physical pain or natural disaster or the terrible evil world that is to blame, but rather it is love, love itself that breaks us.

[But love] is where things really hurt.  There is no hurt like the hurt that happens in the place where we love.  That is the vulnerable place in all human relationships.  … In the relationship of marriage it is this very quality of vulnerability that is exposed, exalted, exploited.  Many give up and run away, their entire lives collapsing in ruins.  But even those who hang on face inevitable ruin, for they must be broken too.

The difference, however, lies in the place where ruin is experienced.  For in those who run away from the intense fire of marriage, the ruin happens in the place in them that is love, and this place, this glorious and mysterious and delicate capacity in them, really does receive a terrible wound, sometimes enough to impair it for life.  But in the case of those who hang on to love and who see it through to its mortal finish, the ruin that occurs, the internal debacle, is not in the place of love (although it may often seem to be happening there), but rather in the place, in the palace, of the ego.  And that makes all the difference in the world.  It is one thing to wreck the ego.  But it is quite another, and indeed the very opposite, to make shipwreck of the soul.

One of the hardest things in marriage is the feeling of being watched.  It is the constant surveillance that can get to one, that can wear one down like a bright light shining in the eyes, and that leads inevitably to the crumbling of all defenses, all facades, all the customary shams and masquerades of the personality.  Does this make marriage sound like some ordeal of brainwashing?  But actually that is very much the sort of effect it has, with the single exception that the one doing the brainwashing, the one holding the bright light, is not some ruthless prosecutor or torturer, but love.  It I love that pins us to the wall and makes us answer, and makes us keep on answering until the answer that comes out is the one that love wants to hear.

Matrimony, then, through this devastating strategy of watching, launches a fierce and unrelenting attack upon the fortress of the ego, upon that place in a person that craves privacy, independence, self-sufficiency, lack of interference.”

These wonderful quotes and others like them were found between pages 21 and 24 of Mike’s book.  If you have not guessed it yet the theme is: love = sacrifice (and the pain therein).  But don’t worry; though he has wounded me, this next quote is the hope underlying the voluntary embracing of such wounding.

“Under such treatment, of course, a person is given the opportunity of opening like a flower and becoming perfectly natural, perfectly himself.  And yet this true self of his turns out, surprisingly, to be someone he himself has never met before, someone just mysteriously different enough from the real self he thought he was that it can only be described, finally, as someone entirely new.  Or someone who has been there all along, perhaps, but who has finally become self-confident enough, through the grace of love, to step out of the shadows.”

This is the freedom I look forward to.

Grace be with us all and me especially,

David S.

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