The Humility of Love

6 minute read

I do not know how many people understand the religious meaning of humility, beyond its etymology or dictionary definition. Still fewer, I believe, know what it means to practise until humility becomes one of those qualities that, in former times, only saints acquired through long discipline and suffering.

This practice is common in monasteries, where it takes the form of "obedience". It can also be found in Buddhism, yoga and other Eastern traditions. The aspirant or disciple who wishes to follow a religious path tries to eliminate the ego by carrying out, without protest, whatever is required by the master or spiritual leader of a religious community.

I learnt humility through the lived experience of love. At first, I did not properly understand what was happening to me, but in time I learnt the lesson.

Why must we remain awake at all times and devote ourselves to prayer and inner meditation?

Because we must remain continuously watchful, as in the parable of the ten virgins. I have often wondered how someone can say that they no longer feel anything for the person they once loved, or worse, that they stayed with someone merely for appearances, simply to be in a relationship.

The difficulty is that love does not remain at its highest intensity all the time. Sometimes we become lost in the thickets of destiny and forget where we began and where we hoped to arrive. Moments of intense lived experience at elevated levels do not happen every day. The ecstasy of lived experience does not occur from one moment to the next or appear on demand. It is given to us after long suffering and waiting. Hence the words: patience... patience... patience.

If we are not attentive and watchful like the virgins, faithfully tending to our task, the moment of lived experience may pass us by. We may confuse it with brief moments of happiness and attribute it to other events or circumstances in our lives.

But if you are conscious when love reveals itself and casts its grace within, you will live far more intensely. You will feel the divinity in its lived experience and understand something you might otherwise have missed. Many people say that they have never experienced love at its highest level or felt it shake their inner world. They did not seek it and, above all, did not place this noble feeling above everything else.

Anyone who has felt the lived experience of love for even a moment will understand what I mean. Many regard the lived experience of love as more important than anything else; the rest either ignore it or refuse to admit it. Those who enjoy materially peaceful lives may find the lived experience of love still harder to understand. Most throw themselves into entertainment and self-forgetting.

Suffering brings the soul closer to awareness of itself while the body is already tormented by thought. It creates a need to experience something beyond daily routine and to understand the purpose of life, so that life is not lived in vain, without direction and certainly not for materialism alone.

To make my meaning clearer, I will explain further. All of us experience love at a greater or lesser level, according to what each has been given. Those who are conscious of it will have moments when they feel they are flying, when the divine seems to have descended into their lives.

Those who experience love without being conscious of it - perhaps because their lives are directed towards material or professional success - believe they experience less love than others and feel inferior to them in lived experience. In truth, they miss the moments in which they could rise to the same awareness of lived experience because they are not keeping watch.

If they turned their thinking towards deeper lived experience, stopped fleeing love and faced hardship each day not by accumulating more materially but by surrendering more deeply to inwardness and prayer, they would no longer lose a single moment of the lived experience of love. Even simply becoming conscious of what they feel, when they do not yet understand it, would make a difference.

They often discover how intensely they had felt only after leaving the person with whom they shared a relationship, or after being left for various reasons, perhaps without feeling affected at first. Only then do torment and suffering begin, because they encounter the emptiness that had previously been filled by "something", by the small measure of love within their hearts.

Love does not arrive like a storm and vanish like smoke. It appears slowly and invisibly and, if we know how to cherish it and perceive the divine within its lived experience, it never disappears.

Love at first sight does exist, but it often brings a storm as well. Two souls become compatible and mature enough to recognise their own existence only after years of practice and inward reflection. Mature relationships that have endured, especially those founded upon respect and understanding, allow souls to draw close and learn trust. Such relationships will withstand many storms.

Some people discover this only after making a decision because they wanted more "action" in their lives or believed love had no home in their hearts. The suffering that follows will correspond to how profoundly the soul needs to awaken. Some sleep through an entire lifetime and understand only at its end that, at one particular moment, they lost the most beautiful part of their destiny. Others never understand, and through selfishness and ignorance bring suffering both to themselves and to those around them.

Humility appears in the life of someone who experiences love when they move beyond the other person's madness, forgive the suffering caused, regard infidelity as a moment of ignorance, receive the beloved when they return asking forgiveness, leave arguments and misery behind, and find joy simply in the lived experience of love.

As someone said long ago, even the servants of the person you love become part of your love because they surround the beloved. You do not love in order to receive love in return, but above all to give it. You are happy simply because the person you love is happy.

Everything else is a trap laid by destiny to destroy the sacredness of the lived experience of love between souls who give themselves to one another, or who once rested at love's breast. The love of which I speak can be experienced between souls who have respected each other, lived their love in peace, honoured it mutually and perceived the divine within its lived experience.

Others still have a long struggle ahead. At least one of them may have to struggle until love is fulfilled, or suffer greatly until the beloved understands and becomes conscious of the lived experience of love - perhaps for an entire lifetime.

Sometimes another person is needed to administer destiny's treatment for ignorance before the lived experience of love. That person brings the suffering that those who loved could never inflict, because their hearts were incapable of causing pain to the beloved.

When you love, and especially when you respect the lived experience of love, you do not wish to make the beloved suffer. You do not treat that person as an object or, above all, as a possession, but as a gift. Love does not belong to us; it is given. In the same way, two people who love each other give one another freedom and complete trust.

They wish only to pass together through every trial and sorrow of life and to rejoice in their shared experience until eternal sleep descends upon their bodies.

The road of humility within the lived experience of love can begin only with the path of inner prayer. Otherwise, upon a road filled with obstacles and dangers, you will possess nothing with which to struggle against destiny and the society in which you live.

First published in Romanian on 4 April 2011. This English translation preserves the perspective of that period.

Original Romanian article: Smerenia iubirii.