I thought a great deal about Dreve's love-story in relation to the
young people, in relation to the love of humanity, and in relation to
the mystical growth of a man denied the mate on earth. In the first
place, there must be many great love stories in the coming decades of
reconstruction, if for no other reason than that great children are
coming in. Such friends and brothers and comrades-of-all-the-earth can
only be born through the excellent and adequate love of man and woman.
In a recent novel, an old priest of the Gobi tells something of the
love story of the future to a young American who is greatly troubled in
his romance. I quote three or four paragraphs because this expression
in fiction is clearer than I could write it again. Rajananda says:
I have watched your devotion for the woman and it has been a holy
thing, my son. You love well. She has become more than earth-woman
to you. She has become the way to God. This leads to true _yoga_.
Where there is love like yours, there is no lust. Without these
trials you could not have known so soon the love that will bring
you in good time to her breast. The ways of easily-wedded pairs
sink into commonness soon--the dull and dreamless death. It is
those who are kept apart, who overcome great obstacles, who learn
the greatest thing of all--to wait--who touch the upper reaches of
splendour in the love of man and woman, and thus prepare themselves
for the greater union and the higher questing which is the love of
God together.
The seer must know the hearts of men. Knowledge of love is the
knowledge of God. Love is the Wheel of Life; love is the Holy
Breath that turns the Wheel. The seer is far from ready for his
work in the world, who has forgotten from his breast the love of
man and woman. And then, my son, we are almost at the end of the
night of the world. The Builders are coming in to take the places
of those who have torn down with war and every other madness
of self. These Builders must be born of men and women--the New
Race--but of men and women who have learned what great love means.
... Listen, my son: in the elder days men put away their women to
worship God. The prophets, the seers, the holy men walked alone,
and left the younger-souls of the world to bring forth sons. The
time was not ripe for the race of heroes, therefore the mere
children of men brought forth children. And all the masters spoke
of the love of God for man, and the love of man for man, and the
love of woman for her child, but no one spoke of the love of man
and woman. All the sacred writings passed lightly over that, even
the lips of the avatars were sealed. But now the Old is destroying
itself in the outer world; the last great night of matter and of
self is close to breaking into light; the time for heroes has come,
my son, and heroes still must be born of this sacred mystery--the
love of man and woman. So all the priests have this message now,
all the teachers and leaders of men, even I, old Rajananda who
speaks to you, and who has never known the kiss of woman--all are
opening to the world the great story, unsealing the greatness of
the love of man and woman.... For the Builders are coming, coming
to lift the earth--the Saints are coming, my son--old Rajananda
hears them singing; the Heroes are coming with light about their
heads and their voices beautiful with the Story of God.... And now
I must sleep. I go to my daughter, who waits for you.... Once,
before you came, she rested my head and filled my bowl in the stone
square at Nadiram. Even now she waits for you in the hills of my
country--not far from this place, my son----
* * * * *
In the big expansions of life, in moments of great happiness, or
hard-driven by pain--most of us have realised that the higher we rise
in human consciousness, the nearer we get to the All. Thousands of
people now living have risen, for short periods at least, above the
sense of separateness, in which they realised that the finest and most
exalted love a man may have is for "the great orphan, Humanity."
The human heart is awakened through the love of one, to the more
spacious expression for the world. All life is a learning how to love.
The last love of the flesh and the rolling years, before man turns his
love from flesh to spirit, is the grand passion of man and woman, yet
man does not abandon the woman in turning to Humanity or to the Unseen.
Rather, hand in hand, the eyes of the man and woman are uplifted to one
star--the Apex of a Triangle perfected.... Yet one must not turn to the
Unseen until he has learned the full agony and ecstasy of the seen.
"Love humanity by all means," I tell younger ones, "but learn what love
means first. Do not undertake to destroy passion until you have learned
its glory and madness. Rather lift passion to adoration, and use it,
full-powered, upon that which unfolds forever for your worship. It is
not well to kill out a personality until you get one."
* * * * *
Our youthful reconstructionists are apt to stir the community with
opinions or actions, which have to do with their own heart stories
and the world's romance. They have a way of confounding the seasoned
authorities of pastorate and parish, with embarrassing questions in
regard to method and magic in the making of two souls into one. These
young people may not be modest according to Elizabethan ideals; in
fact, the young women are apt to go half-way in the choice of the man
who is to be the father of her children, but this is an essential of
innate beauty and fastidiousness. More and more the higher types of the
new social order are questers for that single and holy mating which
brings nearer the dream of the beautiful and heroic in children, and
which gives us a glimpse of a future to die for.
The story of Romance cannot be written nor interpreted in life without
its hill-rock, named Liberty. There is no man-made law for love. The
first business of human beings is to find their own on earth. All
makeshifts part away; all short-range systems scurry past; all comets
and asteroids cease to be considered, when a pair of suns whip into
each other's attraction. And so it is with a true-mated pair. Those
who have dreamed long and kept themselves pure, realise here below for
a time the raptures of the elect. The new generation has a sense of
this; and while its eyes look hard and daringly for its own, its finer
examples preserve an integrity for the one until he is found.
The New Race realises that promiscuity is only a lack of taste. To draw
the fulness and redolence from a book or a friend or a lover, from any
episode or fabric of life, one must search for the true, as well as the
beautiful, and the beautiful as well as the good.... Perhaps that tells
it best--it dares to love Beauty, this New Race. It means to bring
back the beauty of the body as well as to breathe forth the Soul. Its
devil and its danger is Paganism. It loves Nature so well that it is in
danger of forgetting that the old Mother is not complete in herself,
but a manifest of her Lord Sun....
* * * * *
As to the liberty of its loves--the New Race realises that one cannot
be held, except by vulgar hands, where that one does not want to stay.
A mated man and woman turn each other absolutely free, and the first
cry of their liberty is toward one immortal nest. Those firmly caught
in the pure dream are content to wait for each other. They do not
experiment. They realise the long road of romance--a road so long that
the three-score and ten is but a caravansary of the night. They build
above the flesh if for no other reason than to come into the greater
beauty of the flesh. Renouncing nothing, devoted to austerity only for
mystical union, carried away in no abandonment, they seek to achieve
that command of the body by the mind, and that command of the body
and mind by the Soul, which reveals the ultimate truth--that the plan
is for Joy; that the best of all things is for men who have mastered
themselves; that chastity is the breath and inevitable answer to
self-conquest.
The growth of Romance through an ideal mating becomes a fusion at last
of all the loves of earth. Connubial blessedness is therefore more
reverently to be promoted than procreation, for upon it depends the
loveliness of issue. The New Race acts upon the conviction that the
love between man and woman is the holiest of earth expressions, rather
than the love of mother and child. The first contains the second.
Still no earth love is the end.... Built through austerity and
idolatry, through denial and abandon, through madness and martyrdom,
through pettiness and chivalry, through pain turning less and less
slowly through the years to power, through a little zone of peace at
last (the calm before the greater storm) the fervour of man and woman
becomes, in the fullness of time, too strong for earth, and in the
final and keenest pain, the administry of a higher force begins....
I mean to tell this in a queer way through the next three or four
chapters. Straight statements will not contain it quite--for it is
_still_ with dream, as yet. Rather I mean to weave the concept for
you--fold on fold--so that at the end you will have it, as they do who
have listened in Chapel many days.
Flesh is not integrated finely enough to carry the higher ardours
of devotion. If the great saints who have learned to pour out their
souls in adoration to the Father should turn back to a mere physical
expression, they would blast themselves as well as the object of their
madness. The awakening of the higher forces of love lifts the eye of
the adorer from the breast to the brow of the beloved--from the brow to
the Initiatory Star risen at last to meridian.
A new dimension of love is entered upon. All life tells the story.
Watch the big birds lift from the sand to the cushion of wings; watch
the airplane quicken its speed until it lifts from the monorail....
Machinery of racking power in a falling house, is that great love which
has not yet learned to look above the body of the chosen one.
This change is the last and highest pain of romance--the breaking
apart of the temporal, for the story of the long road. Man and woman
must go apart for the mastery of self, before they are ready for the
higher mating. The great love story invariably crosses the mountains
of separation. If we cling too long to the less, nature is outraged,
beauty is drained. Brief separations are dangerous, because the lovers
build recklessly with ideals and the rarest spiritual materials.
Meeting again too soon, they encounter an unmiraculous creature face
to face. If they had really completed the journey, finished the task
apart, they would have come into that tenderness which loves the human
frailties of each other, and which sees the manifest of three-score-ten
merely as a garment particularly made for a particular journey.
* * * * *
There is always wrecking work, before a new and wider circle is entered
upon. The time will come when men and women shall learn that the
magic of going apart is equal to the magic of coming together. In all
birth-times, in all transitions, the consciousness of the bearer is
changed--often queerly.... One can endure the primitive and the child
in the other's mind; one might adore the great play of passion, and
all the art of it; one might never weary of fragrance of throat, or
magnetism of hand, the inimitable plays and child things--but the mind
is forever the slayer of the real....
Remember, there is not a full union possible on the physical plane.
The body is the barrier that separates souls. Those who believe they
have all of each other in that which they see and hear and touch--have
far to come in the real love story. Have you ever asked yourself
what physical passion is? It is a frenzy to overcome separation.
This separation was necessary for the diffusion of life. It is the
outbreath, the going forth, the great generative plan.... Physical
passion does not satisfy the agony of the soul; often it only makes
the agony more keen. In the early phenomena of all great love stories,
there is encountered that blinding, bewildering need _to become the
other_--to lose identity, to fly somehow into the breast of the other
and be no more. This is keen pain of love but also an intimation of
greater union.
* * * * *
There was a man who had found much of beauty and power, much of the
Burning Desert and certain wonderful touches of the peace of the Hill
Country--in his story with a certain woman. She loved him in a way more
real than he dreamed. Life had shown him much to scoff at. He had been
glad to make the most, merely, of an exquisite playwoman. One day she
was down town to meet him, but he left her for a business appointment.
That afternoon, about everything he had in a material way was swept
from him--much to which his ambition had tied itself for several
years. The man was badly rocked. He walked the streets--shocked almost
to laughter, to find all that he had held for, and held to, plucked
from under.... At length he thought of the woman who waited. The
laugh of mockery quickened, because he thought of losing her, too--a
worldly-heart who would go with the rest--goods that perish.
He knocked at the door where she waited. It was opened swiftly. He
did not need to speak.... She seemed above and around him. There was
a great still sweetness he had never dreamed of as a man (and could
only remember dimly as a child to his mother), arms of tenderness
and healing.... He saw that instant in her eyes that nothing of the
world ever did nor ever could really separate them. The queerest thing
about it all was, that he used a word he never could use before--a
word, as he said, that had been so badly worked by the world that it
needed a lot of washing before it was fit for him. Yet it came to his
lips--_wife_--in a way that showed him also a new meaning to the word
_forever_.
* * * * *
This subject of love and mating is only opened. There is much to say
in pages that follow, but now, apropos of nothing, if not this theme,
there is a chapter of letters. They somehow contain the spirit of many
things I have longed to express. Those to whom they appeal will find
the last pages of the book richer because of the insert.
* * * * *
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