Gabriel Marcel: Session 4

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:10)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley. Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to our time together, turning for trustworthy guidance to Gabriel Marcel's teachings on love. As with our prior two sessions on fidelity and then on hope, we're still in passages in Marcel and commentary found in Chapter Five of Kenneth Gallagher's book, The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, and now we're at Roman numeral Three, page 86 to the end of the chapter. So Marcel begins in a very kind of down-to-earth kind of experiential way about love. Gallagher says on Marcel, Marcel approaches his understanding of love as any experience which opens us to another can be called love. Until in the end, we may not only say that communion is founded on love, but that communion is love. So we'll begin there. That when we speak of love as any experience that opens us to another, it's love that delivers us from the notion that we're a separate, isolated unto ourself person as being adequate for understanding the mystery of who we are. That somehow the mystery of who we are includes an openness. In love, towards another. And also I would say this too, as we move toward the other and that we move toward the other as lovable. And we move toward the other as having a value in their very presence that we recognize. And therefore we seek to merge and be one with that value that we see in the other. And so for example, that we used before in previous sessions, in marital love, when one is holding the Beloved in their arms. They wouldn't say that they're holding love itself in their arms. But neither would they say the Beloved that they're holding is dualistically other than love. Rather they would say the presence of the Beloved that they're holding, they recognize this infinite presence of the infinite love of God presencing itself and giving itself to us as incarnate in the presence of the Beloved that we're holding. And here right away we start to see this unit of communal sensitivity. And while this is true of marital love, it's true of all forms of love. Father, mother, sister, brother, lover, spouse, beloved teacher, beloved student, beloved community, grandmother, grandfather, this way, the Beloved.

Also, in this Thou dimension that we see that moves us towards this is we also see this interpersonal communion. Also it's always intrapersonal. We ourselves have a value in the depth of ourself. And therefore in love we seek to be ever more one with and open to and grounded in that depth, which we recognize in the depth of the mystery of ourself is the mystery of the infinite love of God giving itself to us as the very depth of ourself. And our nothingness without God. And also even broader also, it includes the earth, the Thou dimension of the earth, St. John of the Cross. He's out walking alone in the mountains. And he said, in possessiveness of heart, we're tempted to try to possess it like real estate. We walk along and it goes kind of deeper, and we see the beloved has passed this way in haste. And then he says, funny, my beloved is the mountains. That the world itself is God's body. That is, bodying forth the love that's uttering it into being. That which is the sacramental divine dimensions of the darkness of the night, the smell of flowers, the earth, the world, what is. He says also, Gallagher goes on to say, all this poetic, beautiful language of love is thou. It was true. But what he also invites us to look at is very often some of the deepest, most intimate suffering that we endure, we experience in love, in the desire for love. Gallagher writes, In the first place, if love really reaches the being of the other, then how can it be exposed to error? And yet, it is no uncommon observation that love is often bestowed on unworthy recipients and callously betrayed by them. Does this not make it look as if love were all along and thought of itself to be made contact with the being of another was really flirting around a fictitious idea of our own devising? You are not who I thought you were to be. You are no longer the one that I love, is the explanation that is wrung from a person when the scales of illusion falls from their eyes. I'd like to reflect on this, really. When we love somebody, lover, spouse, brother, friend, what we're drawn towards are the characteristics of the person that we find lovable. And so what we find in them are their qualities, their character. We see maybe that they're understanding, that they're kind, that they're humble, that they're sensitive, that they're honest, like a litany of lovable characteristics. And in those lovable characteristics, we then move toward them, want to be one with that, with them in the lovable characteristics. But then what happens is that as we get into the trenches of the relationship, we discover other qualities start emerging that are unloving. The person is unkind, quick to anger, cynical, judgmental, insensitive, aloof, addictive, indifferent, etc., etc., etc. And you are not who I thought you were. Because when we first moved towards it, we were at our best. You know, we're kind of really putting it on. This is good. But over time, what starts leaking through, you know, are these other qualities that start shining out this way. It goes like this. Now, here's the thing. And he talks about this more. He has a lovely book called Homo Viator, The Human Person, The Journeyer. And he talks about the sifting out over time. What he implies here is this. If I tell the beloved, it might be my father, my mother, my sister, my brother, my spouse, whatever. When I point out to them that this aspect of themselves is hurtful, not just hurtful to me, but it's also hurtful to themselves. If they take that in and they take it to heart, and they commit themselves to working on that, they're all the more lovable to us. And likewise, they return the favor and let us know that living with us is no walk in the park either. And we have certain kind of iffy ethics coming out. And as they pointed out to us, and if we acknowledge that, if we say that, you know, thank you for that, I'm going to work on that. The more we sincerely work on it, the more lovable we become. So, interestingly enough, it's these very characteristics that drew us to the person, that are still there, but unexpectedly, kind of paradoxically, it's the very characteristics that are hurtful and unloving, which when pointed out, become all the more lovable. He said, but the real problem, Marcel says, is that the finite self refuses to admit. They kind of dig in. Either because they know it's true, but they don't care, or they won't admit it because they're in denial. They don't see it. They won't let it in. And insofar as they won't let it in, they won't deny it. Then we have to do our best to keep pointing out to them, this is hurtful. This is hurtful. And sometimes no relationship is perfect, whether it's your father, your mother. But sometimes if the hurtful aspects of the self are so pervasively hurtful, we realize it's antithetical to love, and it's hurtful to love. And here's what's really sad about it. When we look at a lot of therapies about this, we can see how sadly we went on for how long we went along with that. The price paid for the half-lived life is bitter. Either because we're afraid to be alone, or because we don't really think we deserve better. Or it's a ritualistic reenactment of our family of origin, and we are unconsciously drawn to it, and it plays itself out. So we come to these places where then we sometimes, if necessary, we have to end the relationship. End the relationship for the sake of love, and for the sake of the truth of love, and for the truth of ourself. So it isn't just, Carl Jung talks about the shadow, and the shadow is the unacknowledged aspects of the self, which are these broken places within ourselves. But also, another way of looking at the shadow, the part of the aspect of ourself we don't see, is we don't see the divinity of ourself. See, we don't see that we're worth all that God is worth, in our nothingness without God, because we are God's manifested love, giving itself to us as the mystery of who we are. So it's really kind of honoring the light of love, like the light of the divinity of ourself, that we face the truth and sort that out in the midst of conditions, living in the light of the unconditioned, and that goes the way it goes. But Marcel would kind of invite us to be considered, be sensitive to these patterns, and the details around what we're talking about now are never the same, because it's as unique as our signature or our fingerprints. But we recognize the patterns, that each of us is a unique addition of this universal story, and this is one of the patterns. And Marcel is helping us to see that, about characterization. But then he then moves on to say, but if we're drawn to what's characterizable, because that's how we, you have to start somewhere, you recognize the qualities, their personality and their givens, and you start, it's real. What he's really talking about is this love that is the infinite, and he uses the infinity of being, but Gallagher is very clear, implicit, he's talking about God, God is love. What he's really talking about is that he's now going to offer a series of aphorisms about the ultimacy of love, and that's what he's talking about, as with fidelity. And so the vision of ourself is that the mystery of ourself opens out upon and extends out into the mystery of consciousness, the mystery of love, the mystery of being human, and it also opens out upon the mystery of the infinite mystery of the infinite love, the mystery of God. And God infinitely giving the mystery of God away is the mystery of who we are. That's the vision aspect. So we're looking at fidelity, and we're looking at hope, and now we're looking at love as modalities, where that vision that is our very ontology, our very being, shines through into consciousness. So that's what he's really looking at. And then how can we then learn to live in the light of that, the truth of ourself shining into consciousness, and here it's love. So here is now a series of aphorisms, like holy sayings. And notice that each one of these is worth sitting with it. It's what makes it Lectio Divina, like it's very evocative on what the implications are. And we sit with it, and it begins this first aphorism.