An Excerpt From The Book Enchanted Love
By Marianne Williamson”
Love can be a huge mountain, a gentle garden, a raging storm, a cool breeze, or a perfect bath. But there is always fire somewhere nearby. There is always the red-hot stuff of the soul’s initiation. If there isn’t fire, then it isn’t love. It might be a marriage that lasts forever. It might have all of the signs of a “successful relationship.” But if it doesn’t insist that you move to the next level, if it doesn’t take your heart and make it explode into a million pieces, only to fall back together again in some moment of enlightened understanding, then you haven’t really loved. You’ve done the bourgeois thing perhaps, but let’s not call that love.
Any time there is a chance for deep love, there is standing in front of that love a wall of fire. That fire might take the form of something burning within you- an inner condition- or it might take the form of an outer circumstance. But there is never love without fire. To the mystic, the presence of that fire does not say, “Go away.” To the mystic, the presence of that fire says, “Here, if you are strong enough to take it, is love.
Chaka Khan sang a song years ago, in which she proclaimed that she was willing to “go through the fire” for her man. The truth is, it is that fire that molds us. The fire is not the danger of the relationship, but its greatest gift. It does not burn up the essential self, but rather it burns up everything else. When a wall of fire stands in front of you, but one you truly love is on the other side of it, then reaching through the fire for your beloved’s hand will make you a magical being who can walk through fire without getting burned. At that point, we take on another frequency of consciousness. When we can do that, we can do most anything.
The world gives prizes for many things. There’s a prize for the best of everything that anyone can imagine. But the only prize for the artist at love is the thrill of knowing you’ve made it through the fire to the other side. There is no worldly prize that can match the thrill of this accomplishment, and the smile it brings to two people’s faces.
The thrill of knowing that that fire is behind you, and that the metal in your heart has turned to gold, makes of a relationship a sacred chalice. Humanity’s romantic energies are ready for that chalice; we have the water, we just haven’t had the cup. A civilization that doesn’t acknowledge the sacred in any meaningful, practical way, but rather leaves it in a completely dry and sexless context, has no guidebook for sacred romance. It doesn’t see the divine in most anything truly human, so how could it see the divine in the most human thing in the world?
