Adoremus

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.

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.