love's consequences

You fall in love, my heart, and then you fret about your health?

You steal and then you think of the police?

You claim to love, but it's nonsense, mere play,

If you worry what people will say.

#1902: From Rumi's Kolliyaat-e Shams-e Tabrizi

Search words: wonder, woman, fall

I woke feeling like Wonder Woman and like I was falling in love. As Rumi would remind me, this clearly means I am mad and it's useless to fight that conclusion. It's like stealing: it's done and you cannot go back on it. Just as the thief will live in fear of the police, just so the lover (especially if he is homosexual) will live in fear of his community's disapproval. Any kind of lover will meet with disapproval from some quarter or other. I write these love letters to Rumi, in reply to verses he wrote centuries ago. What kind of weird lover am I?

Yesterday I received and deleted an anonymous spam-like comment that accused me of being too serious. Nonsense! As Rumi so clearly asserts, I am not being serious enough. It's well and truly time I stopped worrying what people will say. It really does feel so hard to write from the heart without restraint of any kind. What stops me here and now? I can't say for sure.

I only know that I have become a Wonder Woman of sorts, a woman who wonders, who questions and analyzes, and seems often to fail to come to definitive conclusions. I want to open my arms wide to life but I fear my resulting vulnerability. I see Christ on the cross with His arms pinned down in that open position as if to insist that he bear the pain of enforced open-ness.

Tuscan Christ @ medievalart.uk.com

Who or what pins Him down? His Father does it by refusing to undo it for His Father is omnipotent and therefore could save His own Son. Jesus' primary values or core beliefs were his downfall. What He loved most is what killed him. I would not want to love so passionately and so I shy away from love altogether.

I am then left in the sorry state that I have nothing to die for. How sad is that? However sad it might be, it's where I'm at and since I love the truth dearly then I must accept it, live with it, and seek no other lovers. Just what is real and present for me at any moment of the day. Let life thus be my lover.

Perhaps it is something like this that the author of John 11:25-26 was trying to get at with his talk of death as life and his promise of a life without death. Who really knows now? Who can say, so long after it was written so?