Love
Is the Answer
“Taught
to believe that the mind, not the heart, is the seat of learning,
many of us believe that to speak of love with any emotional intensity
means we will be perceived as weak and irrational. And it is
especially hard to speak of love when what we have to say calls
attention to the fact that lovelessness is more common than love,
that many of us are not sure what we mean when we talk of love or how
to express love.”
bell hooks
(All About Love)
Texan, Brene Brown makes a
confession in her blog post titled “Doubling Down on Love,”
written after the mass shooting in El Paso last year. She had
withdrawn from the internet, and felt anguish and anger toward the
powers that be that continue to allow guns to proliferate and gun
violence to be an everyday event in America. She was feeling, as many
of us do, burned-out and hollow. I truly understand the feeling. To
get through and past it, she read the books of bell hooks on love.
We all know that love is
the only answer to the problems and divisions that we face, but we
are truly struggling to find that love in ourselves, much less in
those whom we perceive to be on the “other side.” An example of
this is that I could not listen to the State of the Union address last
night. I have to conquer my own emotional response to our current
president first, and somehow find it in myself to reach out to people
who love and support him. That is so hard for me, and I know it is
for many of you.
Jungian Analyst, Jerry R.
Wright, at the seminar I attended last weekend, spoke about our
projections onto Trump—how half of us see him as “anointed” and
a savior, and half of us see him as a demon. Neither of those belong
to him. They represent splits within us; our blindness to our own
inner “savior” and our own “demons.” Instead of seeing them
as belonging to us, we're projecting them out and onto a man who is
more than willing to accept them—especially the savior ones. Before
we can heal the split within ourselves, and retract these
projections, we will have to address our own “nasty-woman” and
“nasty man.” Trump is a great challenge for those of us who liked
President Obama, and who want to have a nation open to immigrants,
and to those of us to don't think assault rifles are appropriate for
“home security.” It's hard for us to see him as a kind and generous person when he denigrates and belittles anyone who dares to oppose
him. His clumsy, hateful words are ones that we ourselves sometimes think but
do not speak—a reflection of our own shadow, our demon-side. It's
ugly. We don't like it in ourselves, and we surely don't like it when
he holds up the mirror that reflects it for us.
Social Psychologist,
Erich Fromm wrote, “There is perhaps no phenomenon which
contains so much destructive feeling as 'moral indignation,' which
permits our hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.”
Ouch! Whenever I see Trump, I feel moral indignation. So what I hope
to do, in the name of love, is to turn away from the seething hatred
I feel for him, and see it as belonging to me. That hate is something
hideous that I am holding on to. I don't know whether I can do it,
but I'm going to try—not because of him, but because it's toxic for
me—and for all of us, and for our nation.
Here is a final quote
from Fromm that I find helpful: “Love is the only sane and
satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.” If we
can find love in our hearts, perhaps there is hope for healing our
deep divisions.
In the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment