Walter wept, with deep, gluttural groans. His face was pinched by the pain of a love he could not have. He had fallen in love with a woman. But he was committed to another. And he wasn't bearing up well in the conflict.
Walter is a minister, and a good man, a man of sorrows for the sorrows of his people, too sensitive for easy survival in his line of work. He cannot immunize himself against other people's pains; when they are bruised by the slings of fortune, he feels their wounds. And because he is open to their pain he is also open to their love.
His wife, Sherry, unlike him, bangs through life with a head of steam heated by fires burning in the belly of a midlife mother making a last-ditch try at making a paying career for herself. So she has little time to give Walter the lingering tenderness a sensitive person needs.
He had not been aware of any hankering for last-chance love, but he was certainly ripe for it, and it came to him in the generous affections of Marian, a woman widowed early, and to whose untimely loss Walter ministered. He brought manly compassion to her womanly sorrow; she answered with the gift of woman's affection. He aches for this loving woman. And he is willing to give up everything to be with her, everything except one, his commitment to Sherry.
Love can be a terror when it runs head-on against a promised love. Fyodor Dostoyevski, the incomparable Russian novelist, fell totally in love with a married woman, could not have her, and wrote of his pain to a friend. "In all my life, I have never suffered so much...My heart is consumed by deathly despair....Oh!
Let God preserve everyone from this terrible, dreadful emotion. Great is the joy of love, but the sufferings are so frightful that it would be better never to be in love." Walter too wished to God he had never known such love.
When righteous people judge those unlucky enough to have fallen ill with illicit love, they see it as a vulgar lust.
But Walter's love felt to him as pure as it was passionate, and more true than any proper love he had known. He did not feel like a David lusting at the sight of a naked Bathsheba; more like the poet Dante longing for the pious Beatrice. Had it been mere list, he would have stuffed his libido into the gulag of his conscience, and repented of it.
His love was beautiful; but it ran a foul of commitment, and the conflict was Walter's sorrow.
If I had not believed in commitment, I might have told Walter something like this: Walter, it's a choice between desires; you have to decide what it is that you really want. Do you want the security of a stable marriage, without much fire in it, along with your job in the church? Or do you want your one chance at love?
No conflict of commitment, just a choice between what you want more and what you want less.
But Walter knows he has a conflict. He has a conflict because he believes in commitment and he wants love.
He takes the only cure consistent with his commitment. He breaks with desiring love and sticks with promised love. Spiritual surgery, severence, awesome pain for Walter, of course, maybe even more for the woman he loves.
There is no anesthesia in spiritual surgery.
Commitment does not inoculate people against the pain of competing loves. Commitment often has to surmount and survive the conflict. Meanwhile, let him-or her-scorn the scans who never felt love's wounds.
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing