Sword in the Heart

Sword in the Heart

Last night I saw, “Seduced and Betrayed” with Helen Hunt and Bette Midler. It takes quite a movie to hold my attention past fifteen minutes, but this was an amazing treatment of the enigmatic and paradoxical way human relationships unfold through contrary circumstance and apparent mishap.

The Piscean (in terms of two fish swimming opposite directions) movements of the soul were depicted in an insightfully touching yet non-sentimental way.

As the plot developed, awareness deepened in the main characters from unconscious reaction to conscious choice, culminating in the knowledge that even in committed love a person will hurt his or her dearest ones - and cannot help doing so. And that this is part of the wondrous mystery of intimate human relationships.

At the very end a Jewish fable was related of a father telling his son to jump, and that he would catch him. So the son jumped, and when his father caught him he felt love. And when his father did NOT catch him he felt something more: life.

Interestingly, the character stories portrayed in the movie were almost as convoluted, complex and improbable as my own real one – but not quite.

I also believe love means willingly bearing your heart to the sword of your beloved, but success in this requires practice. Perhaps pain appears in our lives as just that - target practice. And you can’t hit a target you don’t see.

It seems the way to be at peace with uncertainty and unresolved situations is to become fully aware of them. Once consciously embraced they no longer have the power to affect. They appear simply as aspects of the miraculously complicated and impenetrable life God has granted.

But if the prospect of bearing your heart to the sword is daunting, if the many contradictions and seemingly irreconcilable aspects of life present too much threat of pain, the tendency will be to push these under the level of awareness.

Once in the subconscious they are able to influence and affect freely and ceaselessly, bringing suffering into your experience - perhaps in unexpected ways. Thus the agony you hoped to sidestep comes regardless, but remains inaccessible to treatment.

Sometimes God catches us and we feel love. But sometimes He appears to miss.

That "fall," where God's catch wasn't there, is the sword aimed for our very heart.

We know it will hurt, so the choice is whether to avoid or accept it. To push it out of awareness or to make it as conscious as possible.

This is the life lesson that our deepest relationships bring to us over and over

. . . until we get it.