The Quest! People have pursued it across the pages of history, yet it has always eluded them. They were looking for a precious treasure out there. But it was hidden in their very own hearts the whole time. (Harold Klemp)
Every soul on this earth is yearning for love.
The reason for this is the miraculous truth that we are surrounded by love, permeated by love, created by love, and as souls kept alive by love. We are love. Or, as the spiritual poet Rumi said: “Love is not an emotion, it is your very existence.”
Nonetheless, many of us are tortured by the personal experience of not having the love in our lives we are longing, hoping and wishing for. Sometimes this started in early childhood, and that is an excruciatingly painful condition. We have been abandoned, rejected, or neglected when we were most vulnerable, and it broke our hearts. Sometimes the sorrow and grief happened later in life, for example after a divorce, the death of a close family member, or because we never found the kind of love we have been looking for.
And so this never-ending roaming, meandering and reaching out in order to find love becomes a quest. A quest is defined as a long and arduous search for something that is profoundly meaningful to the seeker. Since we are love, what could be more meaningful to us than remembering who we really are? This quest is sacred, because what we are looking for is intensely felt in the physical world, but ultimately not at all of this world.
Theologian Roland Rolheiser calls the source of our yearning the Restless Heart. “In life, all of us are somewhat frustrated in our deep desire to share our being and our richness with others.” This continuing falling short makes us lonely and trying too hard to find the place where we belong, where we experience acceptance, affection and meaning, our true home where we are loved unconditionally.
We are all homesick for a place that our soul remembers, but our ego-driven personality cannot find – because it is looking in all the wrong places, means outside of us.
When it comes to love, to true love, and not those more or less calculated arrangements of relationships – we are brought to our knees sooner or later. It exalts us and it crucifies us at the same time, as Khalil Gibran’s famous poem On Love describes. It brings out the best in us, but also the worst, which is everything that is not love. Our heart cracks and bleeds on our quest, but as they say, the cracks are the opening, where the (spiritual) light comes in.
When we are in the presence of love, we walk on sacred ground. Human love in its many expressions, always aims for the most evolved form, which is unconditional, divine love. And to get to that level of sublimity, our hearts get tested and purified over and over again.
Our restless heart might put up with it temporarily, but ultimately does not settle for nice, superficial relationships. Change, upset happens sooner or later, and we are pushed out of our comfortable nest in order to expand our consciousness.
Also, we might believe that what we are striving for so intensely and so desperately, is success, social status, physical perfection, sex, money, material bling or around-the-clock fun, but as everybody knows who actually has achieved all these things: that’s not it. If we are on a spiritual journey, we are aware that it is love, only love that can give us lasting solace.
We are all heroes. And even though we usually equal a hero, male or female, with the more masculine traits of conquest, courage and decisive action, a hero or heroine can have “a thousand faces” (Joseph Campbell). That is, for example, shown in Fairy Tales with their general preference for female main characters. Even the male ones often display characteristics that don’t seem to fit the stereotype of heroism, like the Ugly Duckling.
The sacred quest for love is a diamond with a myriad of facets. It is my hope that you will recognize yourself now and then, or even again and again, in my blog posts.