Unencumbered Love

I've been learning a lot about love this week.  My journey to the Midwest carried me first to visit 87- and 89-year-old aunts, one of which I hadn't seen for over 20 years and the other for much longer.  When the "younger" one and I left the older, we paused for a "group hug." The moment was so precious.  I felt like my heart would explode, and I could hardly hold back tears.  It had been wonderful catching up on the passing years with these two women, who had been such an important part of my youth.  However, the moment of our parting opened me in a way that I haven't allowed myself for a very long time.  Pure love flowed between us.

Forty-eight hours and a couple hundred miles later, I found myself joining my college roommate and her husband as they prepared for the rehearsal dinner preceding the marriage of their son.  We each had our roles, awesomely orchestrated by the roommate.  I experienced such joy in joining in the preparations for this young man, now 31 but whom I'd known since shortly after his birth.  When everything was in order, the three of us also paused for a "group hug," and once again, I felt such amazing love that I was certain my heart would break wide open.

I was reminded of a moment at least 25 years earlier when the groom-to-be was a youngster of four or five.  At that time, we had quite a love affair as one can only have with a four-year-old. The night before I left town after a visit, he crept into my room and asked if I would move to their city.  Similar to the two flows of love this week, I recall so vividly being overwhelmed with love and joy with this little boy that all these years later the feeling is as fresh as it was all those years ago.  

Yesterday, I took time from the busyness of pre-wedding events to pray, and the image that came to me at that time was of my heart in shackles, swelling so that it bulged beyond and between the constraints.  I immediately felt that my heart has been shackled by the pain of many heartbreaks, and this week it is bursting forth.  The term that came to me was unencumbered love.  In an instant that felt right, but I did look up the term "unencumbered" to clarify the meaning.  According to Google, to be "unencumbered" is "not having any burden or impediment." I suspect that unencumbered love is so free that it cannot be burdened.

The shackles that have protected my heart have been an impediment to a full experience of love.  In fact, until this week, I would say that "love" has been a concept or intellectual construct that I thought I understood but have rarely allowed myself to feel.  The realization also registered that, although I never articulated it or probably even thought about it that way before, I believe in the back of my mind, I've thought about love as a commodity.  I think I've seen it as something I give or something I receive.  In the instances this week I question whether we can give and receive love.  It seems to me that unencumbered love is just there to experience--to wash over us and take our breath away, forever changing us from the soul out.

As I am coming to know, "unencumbered love" requires complete and total surrender to the feeling, and in my case, I think the surrender means that I must let go of the protection that the shackles have provided and to risk the potential of pain in order to be vulnerable to the joy promised.

I am not sure I would have understood this on a spiritual level a week ago before the experiences on my journey. Having glimpsed the wonderful experience of love once again after so long, I ponder how to remove the restraints that I've allowed to remain in place for so long that removing them seems a formidable task. Yet, having glimpsed the wonder of unencumbered love, how can I not persist freedom from impediments to love?

I just really wonder, what if the more we allow ourselves to surrender and be engulfed in the vastness that is love that love itself is what can melt away all impediments, leaving us swimming in a sea of love.