Pineridge Blog

Reflection of Cynthia Bourgeault

I am away this week, but I wanted to share a reflection of Cynthia Bourgeault, author and Episcopal priest, on authentic love:

“That is to say, through a life of con-scious love—the per-sistent practice of lay-ing down one’s life for the other, of the merging or union of wills in the effort to put the other first—the conditions will gradually come about for the creation of one soul. As long as the life goes on, in a renewed union of wills, one may speak of one soul, ‘for the soul is the image of the life.’
“This union of souls cannot be done out of sheer romanti-cism, that initial rush of erotic attraction that is all most of us ever know of love. It is not a product of attraction, but rather of purification: the commitment with which the part-ners adopt the spiritual practice of laying down their lives for each other—facing their shadows, relinquishing old pat-terns and agendas, allowing all self-justification to be seen, brought to the light, and released. In other words, without a mutual and conscious commitment to bring one’s human love into sympathetic vibration with the sacrificial and giving love that is the font of all creation, there is no union of wills or souls. The willingness to die, on whatever level, for the other’s becoming is the practice that gradually transmutes erotic attraction into a force of holy fusion. . . .

“If there is a secret to love’s transforming power, surely it must lie in its uncanny ability to call forth who we truly are. ‘Love always seeks the ultimately real,’ says Bruteau; it has an infallible knack for pushing though dim outer shells and inner dark places and bringing the essence of who we are into the light. Love always brings an increase in being, and it does so by giving us the courage and power to live out who we truly are.

“One fact that contemporary psychology has made emi-nently clear to us is that wholeness can come about only if we embrace the whole of ourselves—not only what is high-est in us, but the shadow as well. For majesty to grow in us, all must come to the light, both the dark parts of oneself that need healing and the light parts that need birthing.”