In time, even the reddest of roses lose their bloom and
gracefully let their petals fall to the floor. When half of all marriages end
in divorce and -  despite our initial hopes for them – many more informal relationships flicker out after just a few
months or a year or two, we can be forgiven for feeling cynical about romantic love.

And yet I have faith still in the value of love’s
enchantment; the rich colors the world takes on in lovers’ eyes. I believe in
the tears of love, the joys of love, in the warmth in the chest that comes when
we feel we have known this person all of our lives and beyond. The recognition:
it is what we long for.

You may say this is nothing more than delusion; that an
enchantment necessarily deceives and leaves us disappointed and possibly
lonely. Yet for all the challenges it may bring in distinguishing reality from
imagination, surely the romance of love is one of the deepest and most integral
experiences of being human. It is a gift from beyond; from beyond the
strategies of the self-seeking mind. It doesn’t come on demand; rather it
chooses us if it is so inclined, even if it may be inconvenient to our best
laid plans. It can upset our world, and yes, it can leave – as suddenly as it
came, or little by little over a lifetime.

But isn’t it worth it, all the same? A broken heart allows
us to feel more deeply the heart of others and their sufferings, and to take
our place more humanly in this world in which everything, but everything, falls
away at last, and not least ourselves. Success in love is determined not by the
length of time two people stay together, but by the generosity, the caring, and
the tenderness they have shared, in parting as well as in staying.

When my own marriage ended, I read my wife ‘The God
Abandons Anthony,’ the astonishing poem by the Greek poet, Cavafy. Anthony and
Cleopatra are about to lose the city of Alexandria to the Roman army. Anthony
is also losing the protection of Dionysius, god of music and wine. He stands on
a balcony as a procession of musicians walks by. The poet urges him not to turn
away from the beauty of the music, but to turn toward it; to take in the full
impact of the loss he is going to sustain; to be willing to listen

to the
exquisite music of that strange procession,

and
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria you

are
leaving.

Can we stand to gaze into the heart of our loss, the
preciousness of what we are losing, and not look away? This is the challenge
Cavafy offered me. His poem gave me the words with which to say goodbye to my
marriage, and, even as it was dissolving, the courage to feel the value it had
served in my life for a period of time.

The poet e.e. cummings takes this courage several steps
further. In his poem it may not always be
so, and i say, he displays a heart-rending generosity.

it may
not always be so; and i say

that
if your lips, which i have loved, should touch

another’s,
and your dear strong fingers clutch

his
heart, as mine in time not far away…..

 if
this should be, i say if this should be-

you of
my heart, send me a little word;

that i
may go unto him, and take his hands,

saying,
Accept all happiness from me.

It is not common to bow so gracefully to the very person
our beloved is turning toward, even as our beloved turns away from us. I feel
humbled by these lines; by what they say of the human being’s capacity to truly
love; her ability to accept the way life moves and has its own intelligence; to
bow deeply to the reality that, in fact, we are never in control of the way
things go. I think of the end of Mary Oliver’s poem In Blackwater Woods, where she says that you have to be able to do
three things in order to live in this world:

to
love what is mortal;

to
hold it

against
your bones knowing

your
own life depends on it;

and,
when the time comes to let it go,

to let
it go.

In loving what is mortal, we know that the object of our
love will pass away. Even so, we love utterly, without reserve. And to let go
when it is time to let go, as Cummings does in his poem, is perhaps the final,
most absolute mark of that love. The poem ends with a heartrending cry of loss:

Then
shall i turn my face, and hear one bird

sing
terribly afar in the lost lands.

For letting go of his beloved in the way he does, freeing
her to follow her life’s deepest affections, does not mean to deny the feelings
he has toward her, but on the contrary, to raise them to their subtlest and
finest station.

The greatest gift of love is the gesture of open arms – let
come what comes – not because you don’t care, or because  you hope to steel yourself against pain, but
because you care so much that you are helpless to do anything else. You bow to
what wants to happen, whatever it is. And as in these last two lines, you
accept the cost, the inevitable blow to the heart. Better in this life, after
all, for the heart to be broken – to take on the rich, the tender vulnerability
of being human – than not.