Commentary 24/11/28 On being in love - Myron J. Pereira

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Jesuit Father Myron J. Pereira, based in Mumbai, has spent more than five decades as an academic, journalist, editor and writer of fiction. He contributes regularly to UCA News on religious and socio-cultural topics.

On being in love

Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love. For in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass. Desiderata, 1692

Charism has the sense of gift, power, energy and unique contribution. (Photo: catholicweekly.com.au)

I have always felt that being in love is far more important than falling in love.

Falling in love is the stuff of movies and novels. It is pleasant, exciting and evanescent. Falling in love is a spontaneous thing, a matter of body chemistry and mood magic. It can happen at 16 or 64. It comes and goes, like the common cold.

But being in love is the stuff of daily living. It’s not a quick fix. It’s slow enchantment, and more, it’s permanently transforming.

The only thing to teach is how to stay in love.

Mid-life and its tensions

For Jung, mid-life was the time of individuation where the individual develops, achieves, reconciles and integrates different polarities. For our Hindu contemporaries, it is grihastashrama, when a man marries and builds a home, nurtures children, counts his achievements and pays his debts to society.

But mid-life can also be a time of crisis. The heart can turn dry, whether for the married or the single. The sense of loneliness and of inadequacy can become acute. The more one possesses the things of this world, the more one fears becoming vulnerable, and the risks of loving.

Most men flee from this risk, and this is why the male fantasy shorn of tenderness turns pornographic and violent, and spills across the headlines of the world in acts of terrorism and death.

To be in love

But to be in love is to be alive, is to be different.

It means commitment and caring, whether within a family of kinship, or a religious community, or a group of one’s choice. To be in love is to be self-confident — more resilient, more receptive, more radiant.

It means growing younger day by day, for “whom the gods love die young,” as the ancient Greeks would say. Not that they die prematurely, but that they never age.

The New Testament says simply, they never die, period. Whom God loves, and who realize how much they are loved, never die. “They have passed from death to life.” (1 John 3.14)

But how can one stay in love always? Can one learn it? Who will teach it?

That, ultimately, is the purpose of a novitiate, of the introduction to the “engaged” life — to make love last, to make it a lifetime thing.

This is what the learning is all about — how to find out more about the beloved, so that when love happens, the feeling doesn’t dissipate into a hopeless infatuation, but turns into a release of real power leading one to know more, cherish more, sacrifice more for the one you care about.

Vocation, charism, destiny

For this is what “vocation” means — being called and loved personally. Vocation, charism, destiny: three words, interchangeable, and yet with such different nuances.

Destiny has a lifelong finality about it. It speaks of fulfillment and achievement, or its polar opposite.

Charism has the sense of gift, power, energy and unique contribution. Charismatics have a magnetic quality about them, as all lovers do. Attractive, but also repellent. Charisms may build up the Church, but first, they give it a good shaking up.

And all love upsets our sedate timetables.

But vocation is a more personal thing. It’s not what you do or can do, but what you were meant to do. It’s not your job or your profession, but what you do best, and what no one else can do unless you do it.

And when you have found this, you have found your own reason for living. You have found your personal style of belonging.

David Steindl-Rast  puts it more eloquently when he speaks, not of falling in love, but of “rising in love”:

Love is saying yes to belonging. That’s my definition, pure and simple. Anything that we call love, as far as I can see, is in some way related to this yes.

What ties all the various notions of love together, from sexual love to the love of your pets, to love of your country to the love of the environment — what ties them all together, is that in each of these cases, we are saying yes to belonging.

It means acting the way people act when they belong together.

                                                             (Belonging to the Universe)

And that’s the way it should be, isn’t it? Saying “yes to belonging,” making that a permanent part of ourselves — “rising in love,” staying in love.

*The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.