Romance & Spiritual Ecology

[An edited version of this article was published in Conscious Choice Magazine. Feb. 2005 and later by the UTNE Reader online. Read edited version here]

Brooding over the loss of love; I churned my disappointments and anger through my heart and my arms as I swam as many laps as it took to find calm. Some days I swam for hours. Walking to my office across the plaza of the court building and seeing the couples - not lovers arm in arm, but lawyers and clients head to head in anxious consultations - I could feel the leeching of emotional poisons into the common stream of humanity. It was at one of these moments that it suddenly hit me: I was also dumping toxic waste into the common pool; with my distress I was polluting the psychic waters in which we all swim!

A few evenings later I took my partner out for dinner and over a bottle of excellent wine gave him the choice: Let us part gracefully, or thrash out a viable coexistence with respect, even if it cannot be with love. His look of immense relief and hope - not hope for us, but for his life returned at last - was answer enough. Oh yes, I was shocked at how eagerly he seized the chance to escape from misery, but had he not displayed absolute emotional honesty at that moment, we might still be fighting and dumping. Now we are cordial, speaking several times a month as old lovers can. Sometimes there are moments of bright, heart-searing compassion for one another. We may yet live into that capacity of which Helen Luke speaks when she attests that even divorced couples can "cherish one another til death do part." And, had I not accepted the pain of parting, I would not have returned to receptive solitude, ready to meet the man who would be my true soulmate.

The Myth of Romantic Love has done all of us in the West a huge disservice!  We are crippled and perverted in our best efforts by a gross misunderstanding of what that form of love was meant to convey. For thirteen years I have worked as an interfaith minister with couples on the path toward marriage - over five hundred couples thus far - and now I have begun to work with couples on the way out. Entering so nobly to the high-calling of love, what soon happens, as the songwriter Carly Simon so aptly phrased it, is this:

"the couples cling and claw

and drown in love's debris."

I swim daily in the current of so-called romantic love, and it's time to speak out about the conditions I am encountering. Now it is time for some lessons in spiritual ecology!

The late, great mythologist, Joseph Campbell, was a close family friend and from my early teens I was privileged to call him "Uncle Joe." He spoke often and with great passion about the Myth of Romantic Love, which was, for him, the foundational psychological insight of the West. Born out of the tumultuous period known as the Middle Ages, Romantic Love was, at first, a mythopoetic revelation formed from the meeting of minds of Christian and Muslim mystics in Spain and southern France. In the absence of warrior husbands, who left en masse to fight the Turks in the Crusades, the feminine spirit found room to expand, indeed explode into blossom under the worshipful gaze of the poet-lovers, those men left behind to woo the newly empowered women. Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughters gave form to this astonishing surge of psyho-spiritual influx in the laws of Courtly Love. The essential Troubadour spirit is reflected in these lines from the late 12th and early 13th centuries:

"Each day I am a better man and purer,

for I serve the noblest lady in the world."  (Arnaut Daniel)

"Lady, for your love I join my hands and worship."  (Bernart de Ventadorn)

"To be in love is to reach toward heaven through a woman!" (Uc de St. Circ)

Romantic Love is, at its core, a spiritual discipline, not a domestic arrangement!

As a tool it is one of the most powerful we have for furthering the Soul's journey. But we have forgotten how to use it, and so it has become downright dangerous for us. Campbell's interpretation of the role of Romantic Love in the West was its capacity to introduce the novel idea of particularity into the primal drive of lust, possession and procreation. "This one and no other!" is the cry of the true lover. This face, and only this face, excites the yearning for: "... the individual, not as a member of some sanctified consensus through which he is given worth... but as an end and value in himself, unique in his imperfections, in his yearnings, in his process of becoming not what he "ought" to be, but what he is, actually and potentially; such a one as was never seen before."  (Flight of the Wild Gander, Campbell)

This form of love, properly understood and experienced, unites the lower instincts with the energy of the heart (for the beloved) and of the mind (for the idea of love) and of the soul (for God). Further, it introduces a kind of sensitivity to spiritual ecology of which I was unaware until I began to notice that of the couples who came to me for premarital counseling, those who professed to be soulmates - that is they recognized in one another a deep familiarity, a bond with the resonance of eternity - immediately gravitated towards a sense of social responsibility in their wedding plans. It was not to merely celebrate their "us-ness" that they wanted a wedding, but to bless and extend the love to all who were present and even beyond their immediate circle.

Reading history mythopoetically, that is with an eye toward its metaphoric content, has given me hope that we can recover the spiritual insights of the past. In the great myths, the great truths remain encoded as images and metaphors that the soul can decipher.

Wherever you are in the cycle of love - coupled, in crisis, uncoupling, resting in solitude, answering the call of love for the first time - you can participate in the spiritual ecology of Romantic Love. It is our special task to sort through the perversions that have blinded us to the real meaning of this gift from our ancestors and take up, once again, the deep delights of reaching the One through devotion to "this One Only of the Many."

 Rev. Rebecca Armstrong