Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life by Osb Joan Chittister, Joan Sister Chittister Page B
Authors: Osb Joan Chittister, Joan Sister Chittister
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serious emotional barrier to being able to negotiate the real tasks of life. It denies us the gift of criticism: There is no one to tell us what we need to know, and no one we are willing to listen to. We isolate ourselves from the very things we need to plot the success we seek.
All the intellect, all the skill in the world, cannot substitute for the fine art of human relationships which, in the end, are what we need most to steer us through life, steady our steps, and carry us over the boulders that block it. Self-love is a sterile relationship at best. How do we learn to love others without the model of those who love us? Where do we turn to understand life when we have exhausted our own resources, but have failed to attach ourselves to the resources of others to complement our own? To make ourselves our own god is to worship a puny god indeed.
From those seeds—a growing awareness of personal incompleteness, insufficiency of soul, the limitations of self-love and the deficiency of our own personal resources—evolve the ability to love beyond narcissism. It leaves us standing stripped of our pretenses and vulnerable to the rest of the world. Love stretches us beyond ourselves and stretches the soul toward inclusiveness. It makes us equal parts of the human race with all the strength and all the weakness, all the good and all the frailty that brings.
We gain the insight to see ourselves through the friendshipswe make. They mirror us to ourselves. In them we see clearly what we do not have as well as what the world cannot do without. They do not judge us or condemn us or reject us. They hold us up while we grow, laughing and playing as we go. They bring us to the best of ourselves. “One’s friends,” George Santayana wrote, “are that part of the human race with which one can be human.”
Friends enable us to know and to accept our own deep needs and so understand and support the needs of others. They bring us home to ourselves and to the rest of the world at the same time. To be in relationship with someone is to open ourselves to becoming more than we can possibly be alone. Then, when that happens, the long nights of wondering, as one more night slips by, what it is that can possibly be missing in life while we touch the empty spot in the heart are over now.
Then when the birthdays come and the anniversaries pile up and Valentine’s Day comes again, we not only send cards, we will also get them.
22
T HE L ONELINESS OF L OVE
The ads are everywhere. The Internet pours them out in multiple millions: fifteen ways to get him to date you, twelve ways to tell if she is the one for you, ten ways to get your love to marry you, eight ways to get your partner’s attention. There’s no end to the lists or the numbers. The only thing wrong with any of them is that they are all selling a bogus product. There are no ways at all to make anyone notice you, love you, choose you, understand you or stay with you, short of physical captivity, of course—and that’s illegal.
The truth is that love is a very individual thing, a very personal reaction, a very unique relationship. All the tricks in the social repertoire without the chemistry that makes the relationship unique will not work. And that’s not foolproof either. Natural attraction brings people together, yes, but it does not promise to keep people together.
Even when people stay together forever, there is little proof that they completely understand each other or can really hear the other person’s pain, or want the same things or perceive the world in the same way and from the same perspective.
Nor can love ever assure two people that they are totally in sync. On the contrary: If anything is difficult, it seems, it is couples’ communication of any kind—in professional comradeships, in long-standing friendships, in married couples. Psychologists and counselor types devote entire workshops to it. They develop therapy sessions to guide couples through it, or at
All the intellect, all the skill in the world, cannot substitute for the fine art of human relationships which, in the end, are what we need most to steer us through life, steady our steps, and carry us over the boulders that block it. Self-love is a sterile relationship at best. How do we learn to love others without the model of those who love us? Where do we turn to understand life when we have exhausted our own resources, but have failed to attach ourselves to the resources of others to complement our own? To make ourselves our own god is to worship a puny god indeed.
From those seeds—a growing awareness of personal incompleteness, insufficiency of soul, the limitations of self-love and the deficiency of our own personal resources—evolve the ability to love beyond narcissism. It leaves us standing stripped of our pretenses and vulnerable to the rest of the world. Love stretches us beyond ourselves and stretches the soul toward inclusiveness. It makes us equal parts of the human race with all the strength and all the weakness, all the good and all the frailty that brings.
We gain the insight to see ourselves through the friendshipswe make. They mirror us to ourselves. In them we see clearly what we do not have as well as what the world cannot do without. They do not judge us or condemn us or reject us. They hold us up while we grow, laughing and playing as we go. They bring us to the best of ourselves. “One’s friends,” George Santayana wrote, “are that part of the human race with which one can be human.”
Friends enable us to know and to accept our own deep needs and so understand and support the needs of others. They bring us home to ourselves and to the rest of the world at the same time. To be in relationship with someone is to open ourselves to becoming more than we can possibly be alone. Then, when that happens, the long nights of wondering, as one more night slips by, what it is that can possibly be missing in life while we touch the empty spot in the heart are over now.
Then when the birthdays come and the anniversaries pile up and Valentine’s Day comes again, we not only send cards, we will also get them.
22
T HE L ONELINESS OF L OVE
The ads are everywhere. The Internet pours them out in multiple millions: fifteen ways to get him to date you, twelve ways to tell if she is the one for you, ten ways to get your love to marry you, eight ways to get your partner’s attention. There’s no end to the lists or the numbers. The only thing wrong with any of them is that they are all selling a bogus product. There are no ways at all to make anyone notice you, love you, choose you, understand you or stay with you, short of physical captivity, of course—and that’s illegal.
The truth is that love is a very individual thing, a very personal reaction, a very unique relationship. All the tricks in the social repertoire without the chemistry that makes the relationship unique will not work. And that’s not foolproof either. Natural attraction brings people together, yes, but it does not promise to keep people together.
Even when people stay together forever, there is little proof that they completely understand each other or can really hear the other person’s pain, or want the same things or perceive the world in the same way and from the same perspective.
Nor can love ever assure two people that they are totally in sync. On the contrary: If anything is difficult, it seems, it is couples’ communication of any kind—in professional comradeships, in long-standing friendships, in married couples. Psychologists and counselor types devote entire workshops to it. They develop therapy sessions to guide couples through it, or at
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