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the sound of a heart breaking
Jan. 14th, 2008 09:31 pmMy heart is breaking because my brother leaves for China again, so I have been thinking about the relationship between love and pain. Love necessitates the possibility of pain. Your heart may be broken in any number of ways.
I used to think, in a misty, uncertain kind of way, that a heart could only be broken once. If your heart was broken, you either recovered from it, or died tragically. But that isn't true. Every time you love, every moment, every instance, is a potential for a broken heart. To love is to risk loss. This leaves us with three possibilities. We may stop feeling because of the possibility of pain, we may stop loving because of the possibility of pain, or we may accept the possibility of pain, and love.
I have closed up my emotions before, I have stopped feeling because it just hurts too much. But an essential part of what it means to be human is to feel. I found, experientially, that you can't just lock out pain. When you lock away pain, you lock away all those other feelings as well. You lock up joy, and peace, and happiness. You can't just lock away part of your heart, you have to put your whole heart inside before you turn the key. If you don't let yourself feel pain and loss because one of your best friends has moved to another state, you can't let yourself feel joy in crunching autumn leaves underfoot. Because if you let yourself feel anything at all, the pain may come flooding back. It does not work to lock your heart away, and it will not make you happy, although it will stop the hurting.
It does not work to stop loving because love may result in hurt. In this poor broken world that we are in, love will certainly result in pain. But, as Dante (and later Lewis) points out, the only place you can be entirely free of feeling pain because you love is not heaven, but hell. And, in a great irony, hell is created by love for you if you must be free from loving. It is love that creates hell, that harrows hell, that sends Virgil to guide you to redemption through hell, but it is also love that will let you stay there if you must.
This, then, means that it is both better to love, and better to let ourselves feel the pain of a broken heart. I am not saying that this is easy, pleasant, or happy. It isn't. But love is such a great and glorious thing that it is worth it. It is better, I have learned to say, to love and have your heart broken than to never love at all. It is better to love and lose the beloved, than to have never loved. For the greatest of these is love.
I used to think, in a misty, uncertain kind of way, that a heart could only be broken once. If your heart was broken, you either recovered from it, or died tragically. But that isn't true. Every time you love, every moment, every instance, is a potential for a broken heart. To love is to risk loss. This leaves us with three possibilities. We may stop feeling because of the possibility of pain, we may stop loving because of the possibility of pain, or we may accept the possibility of pain, and love.
I have closed up my emotions before, I have stopped feeling because it just hurts too much. But an essential part of what it means to be human is to feel. I found, experientially, that you can't just lock out pain. When you lock away pain, you lock away all those other feelings as well. You lock up joy, and peace, and happiness. You can't just lock away part of your heart, you have to put your whole heart inside before you turn the key. If you don't let yourself feel pain and loss because one of your best friends has moved to another state, you can't let yourself feel joy in crunching autumn leaves underfoot. Because if you let yourself feel anything at all, the pain may come flooding back. It does not work to lock your heart away, and it will not make you happy, although it will stop the hurting.
It does not work to stop loving because love may result in hurt. In this poor broken world that we are in, love will certainly result in pain. But, as Dante (and later Lewis) points out, the only place you can be entirely free of feeling pain because you love is not heaven, but hell. And, in a great irony, hell is created by love for you if you must be free from loving. It is love that creates hell, that harrows hell, that sends Virgil to guide you to redemption through hell, but it is also love that will let you stay there if you must.
This, then, means that it is both better to love, and better to let ourselves feel the pain of a broken heart. I am not saying that this is easy, pleasant, or happy. It isn't. But love is such a great and glorious thing that it is worth it. It is better, I have learned to say, to love and have your heart broken than to never love at all. It is better to love and lose the beloved, than to have never loved. For the greatest of these is love.