A very powerful extract from Henri Nouwen's bk "Intimacy". Pls pls, spend some time reading it!! It blew me away when I read it in Sydney....really frees you and changes your mindset. But the lesson behind this extract is definitely going to be an on-going journey....
The Possibility of Love:
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Is love a utopian dream or a possibility within our reach?
How often is the intimate encounter of two persons and expression of their total freedom? Many people are driven into each other's arms in fear and trembling. They embrace each other in despair and loneliness. They cling to each other to prevent worse things from happening. Their sleep together is only an expression of their desire to descape the threatening world, to forget their deep frustration, to ease for a minuate the unbearable tensino of a demanding society, to experience some warmth, protection, and safety. Their privacy does not create a place where they both can grow in freedom and share their mutual discoveries, but a fragile shelter in a storming world.
But can it be anything else, we wonder, if the only real and final solution to life is death. If we don't know where we come from or where we are going, if life is a trembling little flame between two darknesses, if we are thrown into this existence only to be swallowed by it, then being secure seems more pathological than real....With an irrestible strength, the voice breaks through the vicious cycle of our existence saying:
"Let us love one another since love comes from God...(1 John 4:7). In love there can be no fear, but fear is driven out by perfect love: because to fear is to expect punishment, and anyone who is afraid is still imperfect in love (1 John 4:18). (But) GOD IS GREATER THAN OUR HEART (1 John 3:20). We have to love, because he loved us first (1 John 4:19)."
What else does this mean besides the redeeming revelation that love IS a possibility? Perhaps the best definition of revelation is the uncovering of the truth that it is safe to love. The walls of our anxiety, our anguish, our narrowness are broken down and a wide endless horizon is shown. "We have to love, because he loved us first." It is safe to embrace in vulnerability because we both find ourselves in loving hands. It is safe to be available because someone told us that we stand on solid ground. It is safe to surrender because we will not fall into a dark pit but enter a welcoming home. It is safe to be weak because we are surrounded by a creative strength.
To say and live this is a new way of knowing. We are not surrounded by darkness but by light. The sign of love is the sign of weakness: A baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. That is the glory of God, the peace of the world and the good will of all men.
I could not find any other language than this to express that love has become a possibility. If there is a need for a new morality it is the morality which teaches us the fellowship of the weak as a human possibility. Love then is not a clinging to each other in the fear of an oncoming disaster but an encounter in a freedom that allows for the creation of new life. This love cannot be proved. We can only be invited to it and find it to be true by an engaging response. As long as we experience the Christian life as a life which puts restrictions on our freedom of expression, we have perverted and inverted its essence.
The core message of Christianity is exactly this message of the possibility of transcending the taking form of our human existence. The main witness of this message is Jesus who in the exposure of his total vulnerability broke through the chains of death and found his life by losing it. He challenges us to face our fellow man without fear and to enter with Him in the fellowship of the weak, knowing that it will not bring destruction but creation, new energy, new life, and- in the end- a new world.
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