Like a Stone Bridge…

3 minute read

A few days ago, I was struck by the greatness of a love story.

Before one of Buddha's disciples became a monk, he met a beautiful girl and fell in love with her. Buddha asked him, "How much do you love her?"

The disciple answered that he would turn himself into a stone bridge and endure five hundred years of wind, five hundred years of heat and five hundred years of rain, simply so that the girl might cross that bridge.

Buddha was kind to him and said, "Live your life well, and whenever you are uncertain, come and visit me."

Spiritual fathers in our religion also describe the feeling of love in relation to this beautiful story, which in our time has become only a dream.

True love does not grow old. Love is eternal because it has its origin in God, who is defined by the word LOVE. Spiritual, sacred love is different from sexual love, which is short-lived. When someone marries another person out of sacred love, by personal choice and in complete freedom, no matter how greatly the person they married may fail, they cannot divorce. Marriage is an act of responsibility, an undertaking for life. A true friend remains through good and bad alike. In the same way, a marriage upon which the seal of a religious wedding has been placed must continue into the world beyond.

The struggle within a family must be carried to its end. This is the meaning of family life. The sacredness of the family gives us the power to sacrifice and to give ourselves upon the altar of marriage. In a society filled with cruelty, a family becomes durable through frequent confession, shared prayer and abundant communication from both sides. The hardest loneliness is the life of spouses who do not communicate with each other.

Most of us seek the kindred soul who will help us pass through life as though through a dream. Yet destiny, or the little dark one, most often does everything possible to wound those souls through their thinking and, consequently, their actions.

Last year, although I was sad, I was happy. Now I am not sad. Now I no longer am, because my soul wanders across seas and countries like a shadow, praying for the happiness and fulfilment of the beloved soul.

I have loved many "souls", but only one soul will manage to bring the heart to its knees. Only one soul will make me believe that my dream is real. Everything that came before was there to help me understand more clearly and realise within my heart that what I experience is not imagined.

S(h)ouls

You S(h)ouls around me,
Some good and others bad...
Or is only the surface bad?
Then why do you not become good?
Or why not cast away the shell,
So that only the core remains?

I said S(h)ouls, not souls, because the soul in its essence is perfect. It is good. It is love. Over time, however, through its outward expression, it has deteriorated and become soiled, turning into a combination of two things: core and shell - a S(h)oul.

I would like to be... a stone bridge.

Cesária Évora - "Bésame Mucho"

First published in Romanian on 26 October 2010. This English translation preserves the perspective of that period.

Original Romanian article: Ca un pod de piatră....