How I Found Love
There were moments when I was a teenager and felt more emotions than I could handle, like I was being crowded out of my own skin from the amount of anxiety whirling around, like accidentally lit fireworks in a shed. So I would climb out of my bedroom window onto the roof of the house when I couldn’t sleep and sit against the red brick chimney at the peak of it. I could pour out all the fireworks going off inside me into the sky, into the stars. And the presence was always there sitting beside me.
Or on pilgrimages as a young adult when my ardent intention was to know love, as in to experience it directly. Like with the Black Madonna of Vassiviere, I went down on my knees before her, in a small medieval Cathedral in Besse, France, and the presence was there as this ineffable weight inside me seeing out through my eyes – to help me realize that all this love I’m pouring out to the Black Madonna, and to anyone in my life that would let me – that this love is actually a part of me. And when I stood up hours later, the presence of love stood up and walked out of the cathedral with me.
Or when I began to meditate, in my own monk-like way, in my convent dorm room in seminary. Its windows were eye-level to the stain-glassed scenes of Christ’s life on Riverside Church. So, when the light hit just so, every possible color streamed into my apartment. I had been studying the Hesychasts from ancient Byzantium, and I learned that the desert ascetics practiced a form of meditation called the prayer of the heart.
I started trying it out myself. First on my own, and then later under the guidance of a Greek Orthodox priest. The Hesychasts focused all of their attention into the heart. Hesychast comes from the Greek hesychia, which means stillness. So, the Hesychasts went into the stillness of the heart, and curled their torso forward into a “c” in order to do so. I tried the navel-gazing yogic pose of theirs for a while, but my neck was screaming with pain. And for me, listening to the body is a form of devotion. So instead, I began using three intentional breaths to anchor me into the meditation. One to enter the heart, one to connect to the presence I met there, and one to surface again at the end of it.
What I found in this form of meditation was that same presence of love that would somedays, sometimes, silently make my eyes water from the exquisite proximity of it.
Now, after almost two decades of meditating like the Hesychasts, of turning inward daily, the heart is not a concept or a romantic ideal. It’s not a fixed location. And love is not something ultimately we find and meet with because of someone else.
The heart is a time machine, an alchemist, a sanctuary. The heart is an entire world. It’s a world within this one, a world that’s merciful. And love is the presence that waits for us there to return it to when we can find the self-worth to remember it’s always meant for us, or when we exhaust ourselves enough and surrender inward as our last straw, our last shred of hope, and meet with it.
After all our searching, after all our efforts to try and impress, or prove, or earn love from someone else, we return to the presence that exists within the heart, which is where the search ends.
There’s a profound reminder Christ gives us in the gospel of Mary, “Be on your guard so that no one deceives you by saying, ‘Look over here!’ or ‘Look over there!’ For the child of true Humanity exists within you.” (Mary 4:3-5)
We keep thinking, forgetting, misunderstanding that something external to us, a position in the world, a status we want to attain, or a person we’ll one day meet, will fill that unspeakable void, that missing piece, that sense that there’s something fundamentally absent. Mary’s gospel reminds us not to be confused by those deceptive whispers that the answer is found somewhere else or in someone else. The answer “exists within you.”
The word that’s translated into English as “the child of true Humanity,” comes from the Greek Anthropos, which means more directly, fully human and fully divine. One within the other, both. What this word is pointing us to is a different definition or understanding of what it means to be human. Here, in the gospel of Mary, to be human is to be a self and a soul; it’s to contain almost impossibly in one being both what’s otherworldly and infinite and what’s individual and finite.
And what I found by becoming adept at returning to the heart, even in the most painful moments, or especially then, is that this presence of love is what remains.
This presence of love is what endures. And rather than spending time finding it, our lives can be about living from it.
With only more love,
M.