The rabbi writes about the wounds of love:
The Sufi poet Hafiz writes,
- “True Love, my dear,
Is putting an ironclad grip upon
The sore, swollen balls
of a Divine Rogue Elephant
And not having the good fortune to Die!”
(Translation by Daniel Ladinsky)
…When we feel the squeeze of that grip.
In the Zen school, there is a famous koan about a master whose teaching it is to give a student a thorough beating, and no matter what the student’s question is, the beating comes just the same. When the student attempts to answer the question, he receives a beating. When the student remains silent, she gets a beating. When the student attempts to escape or withdraw, a beating comes anyway. Eros often gives us a beating; a complete knock-down, foot-to-groin, nose-smashed-against-asphalt, pummeling. It demands that we experience pain, injury, and the collapse of self, and it presents suffering itself as one of its many (hard to believe) loving touches.
The sexual models the erotic. This is true in all kinds of positive and pleasurable ways, but it is also true in terms of suffering and pain. The sexual life is filled with an array of agonies that are not easily borne by the ego, by the body, or by the identity of a small or limited self.
There is the pain of not being seen or desired, and the pain of being seen starkly, in the clear light of our most obvious flaws and imperfections. There is the pain of not having the attention we seek, or the pain of having it for a time, and then losing it. There is the startling pain of realizing that we are not special.
Or worse, recognizing that when we thought our love was exclusive, that we are not the only one. There is the pain of others wanting more from us than we are able to give, and the pain of trying to give and not being wanted.
