The Dance of Love, Learning, and the Infinite: A Path Through Life's Mystery
There are times when we wake up to the endless web of questions that span across our hearts and minds, and it feels like we are standing at the edge of a vast, infinite mystery. But maybe that's just it: the mystery itself is sacred. Perhaps the soul, in all its longing, is more comfortable in the questions than in the answers. This, I believe, is where the deeper work begins.
Consider this: the soul's deep hunger for love and meaning, for connection. It’s not a quest for perfection or answers. It’s a longing for something more visceral, something that can’t be confined to neat boxes. Meister Eckhart suggests that if the soul could have known God without the world, the world would never have been created. And that, perhaps, is the most profound truth of all. We are woven into the fabric of the world—every tear, every joy, every fleeting moment we experience carries within it a reflection of the divine.
Learning, then, is not merely an intellectual pursuit. It is a spiritual act. As T.H. White writes, "The best thing for being sad is to learn something." To learn isn’t just about accumulating facts; it’s about peeling back the layers of this life, allowing the soul to expand with each new understanding. It’s about tuning into the deep rhythm of the world and hearing, truly hearing, what it has to say to us. It’s a way of becoming intimate with the mystery that surrounds us, and that often resides within us.
But, as we move through life and gather wisdom, we begin to realize something else: that it’s all tied up in love. What we choose to love, how we fall in love, defines everything. Fr. Pedro Arrupe speaks to this with unflinching clarity: “What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.” It will shape your days, your relationships, your purpose, and your legacy.
And yet, love is not a soft, comfortable thing. It is a difficult realization that something other than oneself is real, as Iris Murdoch reminds us. It is, at its core, an exercise in surrender. For how can we truly love something if we are unwilling to leave the comfortable borders of our own perspective and enter into the wild unknown of another? It’s in the wildness of this love that we learn to see beyond the self.
This dance of love and learning exists in all the corners of life. The ancient and the modern, the sacred and the mundane, all come together. And sometimes, we don’t even realize that we’ve stumbled upon something sacred until much later. "God was in this place and I, I did not know it," says Genesis 28:16. There are countless moments in life where we fail to see the divinity in the ordinary, but perhaps that is exactly the point. The divine is woven into the very fabric of our experience.
As we move through life, finding peace in the moments of quiet joy, the wisdom in the things we don’t yet understand, we begin to see that the love we’re searching for isn’t in the big, grand gestures. It’s in the quiet moments, the small conversations, the ways we show up for one another. And in that, we find the real, transformative power.
