Who has not known unrequited love? Who has not known what
it feels like to long for even a few seconds of undivided attention from the
person on whom we are fixated in body, mind and spirit? Unrequited love can take
years to heal, whether or not the two people spend all or part of their life
together, which often happens.
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| The Nativity of Christ: Gerard van Honthorst |
Believing that there is total complementarity of soul between
oneself and the object of one’s desire is, on the whole, a delusion. There may
be complementarity but it can never be total. That belongs with someone quite
different. The idea of another being in any way a ‘twin soul’ leads to the greatest
expectations or, worse still, assumptions, with which come the greatest disillusions
and the most searing pain.
Then there is the other kind of pain, the pain of guilt
and shame associated with being loved by someone whose affections we cannot
return. The guilt and shame are felt most acutely if we have wronged the person
in question. There are other feelings too, ranging from mild irritation to fearing
for one’s life in an age of online violence. Insofar as the recipient of
unrequited love has actively fed the other’s obsession, being the object of
another’s fantasy comes with being unable to love the other person with the
passionate intensity they feel for us. Whichever side of the ‘love, love me not’ equation you
are on, psychological damage is almost inevitable for at least a period of
time. But it has ever been thus, even before the advent of social media.
All of
this is a very inadequate encapsulation of what happens in the arena of love
between two human beings. It applies to all human relationships and not only to
‘romantic’ ones. There are an infinite number of nuanced variations to this simple
scenario. All of them involve pain and risk – however they end up.
Into this seemingly unbreakable cycle of pain and exultation
comes the Christ Child, the incarnation of Love itself. The holy Child comes
not simply to show us how love should be, which he does, of course, but to be in love with us, in every sense. This
means that the Incarnate Word of Love enters into the unloved or unloving heart
of every human being on earth and honours their loving, as he redeems their inability
to return love – in whatever circumstances love is needed.
This is not a theory, anymore than talking about the pain
and shame of unrequited love is a theory. Unrequited love happens, as most of
us know, sometimes more than once in a lifetime. It is often first experienced
in childhood. Whatever the circumstances, unrequited love can lead to hopelessness
and despair, to a person’s heart closing to the possibility of loving or being
loved, because they are afraid of the pain it will cause them, and perhaps also
afraid of its joys.
The coming of the Christ Child obliges the hitherto impossible
to happen in hearts grown cold. There is a momentary relinquishing of a person’s
grip on their own closedness, on the tightness of a heart that has been hurt
beyond the possibility of it ever being healed. The moment of relinquishing occurs
in the split second of their allowing their attention to fall on the holy Child
without perhaps having meant for that to happen. They are not religious. They
are caught unawares and find themselves loving without meaning to and, for some
inexplicable reason, do not allow themselves the usual safety precaution of ‘shutting
down’.
Love only needs a split second to get in. The split
second is as real as any other moment in the passage of time, or of any one
lifetime. But it is also eternity. It is that second, perhaps only known at the
moment of death itself, when a person knows that whatever has been is past and
that they are held in Love itself.
Then comes a realisation of the primary purpose for which they, and all of us,
have been made which is to respond to Love’s invitation, to worship and adore
this impossible, seemingly insignificant Child, as did the shepherds and the kings.
