Real love is spiritual experience that connects me to the cosmos

All my life, I’ve heard people react to transcendent beauty in similar ways. Whether it’s a sunset that fills the sky with color and electricity or a dark night sky filled with a million majestic stars, the typical reaction is similar.

“This makes me feel so small and insignificant,” they say in awe.

I understand the feeling of awe, but I don’t understand feeling small. No transcendent experience has ever made me feel insignificant. For me, the feeling is just the opposite. It makes me feel as though I’m a part of something majestic and universal — something which has no beginning or end.

Experiencing something this huge and significant makes me feel that I’m an inseparable part of this Universe — that every part of me is connected to every other part of Creation, that every person and star and blade of grass is one living thing — with power and life force flowing through all of us.

And there’s no time when I feel this intoxicating experience quite like the times when I’m in love with someone who’s also in love with me.

I don’t know how to define love and I don’t know anybody else who does an adequate job of defining it, either. It’s a living force that’s invisible but obvious to everyone who experiences it. It’s the spiritual equivalent of the wind. I can see and feel and hear the effects of the wind, but I can’t quite tell you what the wind is.

Modern culture is badly confused about love. Maybe every culture has always been confused about it. Those who think seriously about romantic love tend to think of it as a fairly modern thing — driven by popular movies and music. I know that cultures have put pragmatic things — such as money and land and family ties — above love in making marriage partners, but love has been around for at least thousands of years.

Those ancient people were more like us in some respects than we might realize.

In the ancient Hebrew book of Genesis, there’s the story of Jacob’s love for Rachel. Parts of the story make no sense to those of our culture, but we still understand his love for her.

When Jacob first met Rachel, he was instantly smitten by her. He encountered her with a flock of sheep and he helped her water her flock. Right after that, we read, “Then Jacob kissed Rachel and wept aloud.” Jacob felt something so powerfully emotional that it filled his heart and brought him to tears. I’ve experienced that. You probably have, too.

Rachel’s father was named Laban. He wanted Jacob to work for him, but he was willing to compensate him. The Genesis account says, “Jacob loved Rachel. And he said [to Laban], ‘I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel.'”

Jacob must have wanted Rachel pretty badly to agree to wait seven years for her, but this was the deal he and Laban struck. But Laban cheated Jacob. After the seven years had passed, Laban gave him his daughter in marriage — but when morning came, Jacob discovered that Laban had actually given him Rachel’s older sister, Leah, who he didn’t love.

Laban made up a lame excuse for his trick, but Jacob still loved Rachel and wanted her, even though he was stuck with Leah now. He agreed to work an additional seven years for Laban to bless the marriage that he had already agreed to seven years previously. So Jacob worked for Laban for another seven years — and he finally took Rachel as his wife.

Do you love someone enough that you would work seven years to have him or her? And even if you agreed to such a crazy plan, would you work an additional seven years — 14 years in all — to have the person you love?

I’ve asked myself this crazy question and I know the answer, but you might feel entirely different. If I were a young man and if I could be certain of actually getting the object of my love, yes, I would wait seven years. I think I would even wait 14 years. I also realize that makes no sense, but it seems that love rarely makes sense to the rational mind.

Our path to love isn’t as simple as what it was in the cultures of the day. Back then, it was a matter of a father promising his daughter to a man and then keeping his promise. (Obviously, we’re horrified today at the woman having no say in the matter.) Today, it’s more complicated. Two people have to fall in love with each other at the same time and have to overcome all the other objections or complications that can keep two people apart.

But what if the seed of love was laid and circumstances never make things work for two people? What if one of them — or both of them — fall in love with each other along the way? Can love stay alive through years of going separate paths? Can love survive both people making choices along the way that continue to keep them apart?

Does real love survive — even when we make bad choices and end up on very different life paths? Does something conspire to bring such people back together? I honestly don’t know for sure. I think so. I hope so. My gut tells me this is how things work for those who listen to their instincts and obey intuition. But I’m aware that it’s an irrational gamble.

The only thing I can be sure about is that being in love brings me to that same place of transcendental holiness that I experience when I feel connected to all the Universe.

Loving alone — or missing someone — can be a selfish experience. It can be a miserable experience. But when two people love one another and express that love openly to one another, it’s a spiritual experience.

This sort of loving unity makes me feel connected to God and to all of Creation. I think this is the real reason that the book of Genesis tells us that a man and woman can become “one flesh.”

In the deeper sense of oneness, real love can allow two people to unify into something bigger than what the two could ever be working on their own.

I miss this experience of feeling loved by a woman to whom I’ve completely given my heart and soul. There’s no substitute in this world for that.

On this Valentine’s Day, I don’t have that love. A lot of people go out and grab any partner they can find — just so they won’t be alone — but I can’t do that. I have a hunger for real love that’s just as real as the need for food or water. But we can’t always control when — or whether — we can finally have what we so desperately need.

I crave the transcendental experience of oneness born of real love — and I won’t accept the common counterfeits that the world around me is so eager to provide.