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Reading the Gospel, I am interested in seeing the intimacy behaviors of Jesus. I am not interested in reading a Jesus that did not struggle the way we do with relationships.
Spirituality entails learning intimacy, within the paradox of pouring forth and pulling back. We do not have to criticize ourselves for this paradox or seek to resolve it. We see it as the process of learning what True Love is about in the concrete details of romance, marriage, family, work, and our relationship with Life itself.
There is, we could say, only one type of person that is a failure at relationships. That person is one who refuses to enter the crucible of Love, and seeks attachment or repulsion in regard to intimacy. However, one who seeks to discover his or her True Self in a deepening intimacy, while encountering the paradox of the pulsation, comes to discover that faithfulness, not consistency, to the passage of deepening intimacy is the mark of True Love.
Last, Spiritual Practice provides a context of deepening intimacy. In our devotion and meditation, we can see the pulsation of moving toward and pulling away from the Spirit of Love. Over time, we discover how this very process, which might have been disconcerting, was part of our learning to abandon ourselves more fully to the Love of Christ. As we see this process in perspective, we are less likely to be discouraged by the pouring forth and pulling back. Indeed, the process can be seen to be humorous. Then, we begin to take ourselves less seriously, knowing that we are acting the way healthy humans behave in this movement to the core of Love.
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