Transformative Love

Recently I have been writing a lot about the transformative affects of pain and suffering in our lives (see posts like "When Convergence Hits the Fan," "It's Just Perfect," "Spiritual Discipline," and "Undoing the Self"). Maybe it is because I hear so much from people about their suffering and their pains and see (from my outside perspective) the work that it is doing. In any case, it may appear that I have forgotten all about love. Love in fact is the only thing other than our suffering that has the power to transform us.

By transformation what I mean here is that the actual form of our being, and the actual form of our experience is mutated from one manifested form to another, completely different form - literally transformation rewrites out historical context and meaning making. This transition from one form to another often happens so quickly that we cannot notice it from the inside. With pain and suffering, that transition feels like being squished through a seive! But with love, it seems that the previous state or condition just melts away or falls "like scales from our eyes."

In fact I recently told a friend who was having a difficult time that love was the most powerful of all the emotions - that it was far more poweerful than hate. What's more, hate takes energy and stiffening tension, a hardening of every fibre of one's being. But love only requires opening up. I witnessed this once as a mentor of mine stood in front of a man seething with hatred. My friend simply

said, "I can love you stronger than you can hate me!"

Despite that great paragraph in the epilogue of The Scarlet Letter, I do not think that Love and Hate are so much alike. Hate comes from our lack and our distance from the other, resulting in seeing the other as just that: "other." But love is not ours. It flows through us, cleansing and changing us from the inside out. In love, we have a sense that something way bigger than us is working through us. And we are born in love - as a result of live. We are born to love, not to hate - hate has to be taught.