Whenever we love someone (even a natural wonder or common creature), we know that our own higher emotional state awakens in us a kind of exalted energy; one that seems to melt barriers and that brings us into relationship with our beloved in ways beyond our understanding. But that's not all: not only does this unseen force of life grant us access to the secret regions of our beloved's heart but, in some mysterious way, it also forges a union between what were formerly separate beings; two become as one for as long as this permeating presence prevails. What do these insights teach us?
In many ways yet to be discovered, Love is the invisible "Third Party" that makes it possible for any two people to be in love; she is the invisible common ground that allows them to be united in a "place and time" that neither may know without the other. Love is the catalyst of their completion within one another, even as she is the one Heart being shared between them. And if all this sounds a bit mysterious, that's because Love is a Grand Mystery . . . Love works endlessly in Her own secret ways to conquer the willing heart; and each and every one of us -- realized or not -- is an apprentice of the Heart, being prepared by Love for Love.
In our gradual discovery of what Love would have us learn, we are gently directed to consider a relationship with Love in which we no longer yearn to be its possessor, but rather to be possessed by it. And so emerges, like a newborn infant within us, our first true notion of the idea of a Divine Love. Our earlier inclination to abandon ourselves to Love now becomes our need, for in the light of Love's revelations we can see, for the first time, how our own hungering identity -- once viewed as being essential to our experience of love -- is secretly Love's only impediment. She requires that we must lose ourselves within the secret wellspring of her supernal Love if we hope to find the true source of our own heart. And so, gradually, in overlapping but well-defined stages, Love prepares the heart it wants, and the heart it takes is taught Love. The apprenticeship begins.
Love's teaching tames the wild heart; not leashing it, but releasing it; not restricting it, but refining it to receive the freedom of fulfillment; a new kind of Freedom this heart is created to bear and contain in its agreement to be conquered.
The heart without the mastery of Love is unbridled. Dry and empty, coarse and crazy with thirst it runs. It hurts without knowing why, driven to consume without caring whatever it may in the hope of a momentary respite from its own relentless stirring.
The heart subdued by Love surrenders itself and becomes storehouse, pump-house, and storage line. It stands between perfect fullness and complete emptiness, filling and being filled by what has made it. Such hearts touch and are touched by the unimaginable miracle of Love. Hearts such as these have no need for hope of tomorrow because each has become the willing subject and domain of Forever.