Darkness & Light: The Philosophical Path of an Eclectic Pagan

Letter VIII: The Mystery of Love

 My friends, love is the greatest mystery of our life and our generation and the generations to follow. There will never be a moment in which we will understand love in it's grandeur. We will never be able to articulate properly what the meaning or definition of love is, nor be able to see it profoundly with a sense of realism or accomplishment. Love, by all lack of understanding, is elusive but constant. It is always around us, but never within our reach or grasp. It gives us life but proceeds after death. It gives us meaning, but yet, goes beyond our meaning. There is not a single mind in the universe, outside of the greatest mind of God and Goddess, that has been able to even come close to quantifying the gravity of love. It is in all things, but is not all things. It is in us, but is not us. It is in the air we breathe, but it is not the air we breathe. The rain, showering down upon the ground has this sense of love deep within the confines of what we can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. It even goes beyond our comprehension of understanding the beauty of the rain falling on the soft, fertile soil. It is not what we think it is, yet, it is everything we think it is. It is both, because love has no confinement of what it is.

We determine love to either a feeling, or even a presence, or even still... a state of mind. We feel a sense of accomplishment when we bask in the reality of love, but it is not that we have simply arrived at love, but rather, we have only merely opened our eyes to see what has already existed. By doing so, we come closer to this astute awareness to the presence of love, but this does not mean that we have found love or discovered love. We have merely put ourselves in position to see what has already been; the nature of love.

This law of universal and individual truth can cloud our perception of love. Many have refused to believe in what love truly is in favor of what they think or believe love to be. My dear friends, let me be the first to say that we are all wrong with our perception of love, but yet, we are all correct. It is this duality in which our minds have a hard time fathoming such a contradiction can take place in the world that we understand to have limits and bounds. This is only because we have a tendency to put our human qualities in something in order for us to understand it, such as making God human in the Christian doctrine. However, the humanity of love is only a small part, a small section of what love truly is, much like how the humanity of Christ, or even our own humanity, is only but a small portion of what it truly is. Paul even says that "Christ knew that being divine was something that couldn't be grasped", so the idea of Christ, and of love, to have a human element, was to help us to grasp even the tiniest notion of it, but it was never meant to be interpreted as the whole picture.

Our world is scattered with the different ideas of love. Ancient cultures and religions have tried continuously to search and explore and explain the different varieties of love and it's function and role in our life. While this may be satisfactory to our lives here, even the greatest kind of love that we have and express here on this earth will never be enough, because it cannot be fully understood or completed. The notion of "completing ourselves" after finding love is in fact true to a certain point, but not holistically true. Even the idea of becoming one with love is not a correct form in which we can look at love completely. The act of love, the being of love, the presence of love, is something that is even beyond our own spirituality. It is not something that can be grasped. It is like looking into the endless void into space... no matter how far our eyes and our technology can take us, we can never see everything that is beyond that vast horizon.

The endless search for love and constant happiness is but a rug on the perpetual floor of life. It is but a patch of grass on an endless green planet, or a handful of sand on the infinite shoreline. However, in this endless coast, we were made specifically for that patch of grass; for that handful of sand. We may always have our limits, but it is not to constrain us or even try to control us, but to, in fact, free us. Free us from the struggle of needing to find all the answers; the struggle to always be right, to be perfect, and to never falter. With the knowledge that we can chase after something that can never be attained may seem to be purposeless, but once you find the great importance in your specific spot in the line of eternity, then the beauty of eternity opens up. In loving the patch that you reside, you begin to see the countless millions of patches and see the beauty that resides in all of it, for beauty resides in all things, because love resides in all things.