Susan Watkins -- Loving and Letting Go

In Class Reading #4 ('Til We Have Faces)



I have been learning a whole lot about love the past few years. I've been learning that it's far more simple in some ways and infinitely more complicated in others than anything else I can imagine. Just when I think I'm starting to figure it out and get good at it, I realize that the whole time I haven't been acting out of love but out of selfishness.

This is why Orual's story is basically the story of my life. I go through every day feeling victimized, abandoned, like a martyr in this cruel world only to realize with a shock that my perspective is pitifully skewed and I am nothing more than selfish. I think that I am loving the people around me when all I am trying to do is control them.

There's a quote I heard once that goes, "If you love someone, let them go-- if they come back to you they're yours, if they don't then they never were." Brad Brewer wrote a song that has a similar idea whose chorus goes like this:

Though her eyes and though her face
Are beautiful to you
You know her heart, you know her mind
Were never yours to lose
So give her away again

As if I weren't getting the message loud and clear enough this semester, my friend Paul read a poem that he wrote which just struck me to the heart... it's called "my sin" and although I can't quote it perfectly it goes something like this:

tucking you into bed
my love
i finally see the true desire of my heart
oh, that you could love a man more than God tomorrow



Isn't that what we really want a lot of the time? We want someone who will love us above and beyond everything, absolutely everything, else in the world. Indeed, society tells us that this is what "true love" is. I beg to differ, though-- to love another person more than anything else in the world is to love an idol. Humans are merely symbols, incomplete reflections of something out there that's perfect-- and to love them instead of the real Perfection is setting outselves up to be disappointed, without fail.

And so I concede the point that I argued against in our last class-- perhaps longing is an essential part of love. To really love someone is generally to desire their company. However, I maintain that true love tempers longing with altruism-- a desire for the Beloved's utmost good and not our own happiness. Thus sometimes the best way to love someone, really love them, is to allow them to leave. To be joyful that others out there in the world will have the chance to be touched by that same person who touched you so deeply. To be thrilled that he or she will, out there in the world, find life and happiness with or without you. This is love.

It's kind of like a butterfly-- if you sit and wait in a field long enough, a butterfly will come and land near you. The anticipation is a kind of special, tense beauty. The landing and lingering of the small creature is a kind of exhilarating, joyous beauty. The nostalgia and rememberance of the butterfly once it has left is a kind of sweet, sad beauty. All of them are equally phenomenal and precious once we come to appreciate them... but to chase and forcibly catch the butterfly is to risk damaging or even killing it, and losing out on the depth of all of those beauties because we are too caught up in the chase. Better to sit, and wait, and love.