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“Touch Each Other Lightly”
Last week I wrote about the approaching 50th anniversary for my wife Judy and me. I was in an impish mood when I wrote that piece. Today I want to be a little more serious about romance. I'm an old romantic at heart and I'm proud to confess it. So here is my little meditation on one of the most important things in the world.
The most important things we do in life we do as amateurs: being born, discovering love, making marriages, parenting, dying. There's wildness in all these things. Pulse-pounding, breath-stopping, wild-eyed scary, exhilarating, expanding life--these things we do as rank amateurs.
Because of the wildness and mystery of love, sages and singers of songs have never lacked material for their vocations. Diogenes, the Greek philosopher, said, “I have seen the victor subdue all contenders at Olympus and be thrown on his back by the glance of a girl.”
Rumi, the 13th-century Iranian mystic rhapsodized: “Never too many fish in a swift creek, /never too much water for a fish to live in./ No place is too small for lovers,/ nor can lovers see too much of the world./ Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy,/ absentminded. Someone sober will worry about events going badly./ Let the lover be.”
Gwendolyn Brooks has written about being in love: “To be in love/ Is to touch things with a lighter hand./ In yourself you stretch, you are well.”
What is a marriage but the wedding of these two--the wildness and the wellness? It is one of the ironies typical of classical spirituality that in lightly touching another in love, we ourselves are stretched out and made well.
I have often thought about the principle of reciprocity when pondering love with a light touch. This principle is as venerable as love itself. The Christian expression of it is off the lips of Jesus: “Whatever you wish that others do to you, do you even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 7:12) He spoke from his Jewish tradition. The Talmud puts it: “What is hateful to you, do not do to others. That is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary.” (Shabbot, 31a)
Other great religions echo this conviction. The Buddhist says: “Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.” (Udana-Varga 5,18)
The Confucian says: “Surely it is the maxim of loving-kindness: Do not unto others that which you would not have them do unto you.” (Analects 15,23)
The Muslim says: “No one of you is a believer until you desire for the other that which you desire for yourself.” (Sunnah)
So, then, how do we amateurs make a marriage of the wildness and wellness of love and lovers? I say, as one who is about to mark 50 years of marriage, touch the one you love lightly. When we touch each other lightly, we are both made whole. Poet Anthony Machado says: “Look for your other half/who walks always next to you/and tends to be who you aren't.” The happy marriage is that one in which both persons understand that what each needs is a mate who tends to be who their beloved is not.
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