In the previous post I proposed to deepen the research on love. Since when I wrote Walking I developed an idea based on growing: love means growing and making grow. I find it an effective definition, but it keeps too implicit the emotional, affective implications; it is obvious that in growing and make grow we start mechanisms of heart’s involvement, but the definition does not highlight it. From this point of view even the research that I’ve done so far about spirituality can be too cold or rationalist, despite having addressed such issues as absence of control and being captivated by it. On the other hand, this had the advantage of a clear, correct discussion, able to establish firm foundations for future developments.
Returning to the issue, it will be easy to observe, for example, that the concept of growing and make grow, if lends well itself to interpret love for children, does not make us grasp clearly enough all the excitement that is created between two lovers. It is obvious that it will be possible to include it the same in this hermeneutic, but humanly we need concepts able to be as much as possible as a guide and then contain, possibily in the most exlicit ways, at least what we perceive as most important.
At this point in the way I think we are in a position to avail ourselves of a mutual service between love and spirituality: saying that love is spirituality, as well as being a “growing and make grow”, allows us to put a greater emphasis on the emotional component; conversely, saying that human spirituality is love shows that it is a business for humans and requires a heart involvement.
What we aim to deepen here on love is not the whole or the essence; rather we attempt to identify the most fruitful ways of deepening for us who live today in this historical epoch. We leave to psychology the task of describing personalities able to contain all the richness or, on the contrary, personalities victims of problems and therefore unable to implement behaviors that show this richness.
From a spiritual point of view, I find fruitful to highlight love as motion that each of the two lovers forms in the heart of the other; that is, I, as a lover, feel that the beloved person is treading a path inside my heart, without my being able to have total control of this, and I can also perceive that the same way I’m making feel my creating my own path in the heart of the other person. This is close to the dynamic concept of “growing and make grow”: it is now the perception of a growing, a creating a path by the other person in me, and vice versa.
Incidentally, we note that a passage in the book of Proverbs, 30:18-19, recalls this reciprocal walking of one inside the other, but there it seems that the reference is more directly to sexual intercourse, however, considered from a negative point of view: “There are three things that are too amazing for me, four that I do not understand: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a snake on a rock, the way of a ship on the high seas, and the way of a man in a young woman”.
I would add, to this idea of the mutual walking one inside the other, responsibility, that is no more than use of the critical sense; responsibility to be understood not as a burden, but as a pleasure of perceiving ourselves as adults and managing our feelings by practising our constructive freedom.
In short, love comes up as a walking and makig walk, not only each one for other, but also each one in the heart of the other, feeling it, and with the pleasure of practising responsibility and freedom.
