My favorite part of this week's reading was the discussion about love. I especially enjoyed what Paul says about love in Chapter 13.
"I mean that to be in a relationship with God is to be loved purely and furiously. And a person who thinks himself unlovable cannot be in a relationship with God because he can't accept who God is; a Being that is love. We learn that we are lovable or unlovable from other people....that is why God tells us so many times to love each other."
What a great idea! This was a nice segue into Chapter 14 on being alone. When I was studying philosophy in college, I remember talking about Fichte. Fichte wrote about how we need other people to interact with in order to create our sense of self and "otherness." If we don't have that, we go insane. We need other people to be our mirrors. So many times we have heard that you can't be in a relationship with someone else until you love yourself. I think that's true. But it is also clear that we need each other. We learn so much about ourselves from interacting with other people.
I didn't enjoy Chapter 15 as much but I understood where Don is coming from. Being an only child, I am used to having my own space. I have always found it difficult to live with people. I really worried that I wouldn't be cut out for married life but it has been surprisingly easy to live with my husband. What a surprise! I guess he makes a good "mirror" for me.
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I thought a lot about Paul's comment, too. It reminded me of a book I read two years ago called "The Seven Levels of Intimacy", by Matthew Kelly. In that book, Kelly also emphasized that it was necessary to love yourself first before you were ready to enter into an intimate relationship. That book changed my life in a lot of ways, but I especially remember how striking and new that idea was to me at the time. I thought about how I wished I had known that little piece of information before I had gotten married. But life doesn't come with clean lines and you need to learn how to roll with things like that as you go along. I'm amazed by how much more I appreciate and love myself (less of the bad way and more of the good way) than I did then. All of my relationships have improved, including the one with myself.
Your post makes me think again how important it is to make your relationships the best they can be. How important it is to NOT make your relationships a crutch for your own sub-par behavior. It makes me think about all of the vexing beauty and differences there are in my relationships. Not to try to "figure them out", but just to love the people in my life and help them on their paths, whatever they might be.
I'm glad you've found that with Gary.
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