"True love is a willingness to live and even die for one another. It is not a feeling or an emotion. True love is a choice that will ultimately bring one to the Cross. None of us has the strength to do this on our own. It is the Spirit who gives us the grace we need."
The brief prayer following the reflection was: Spirit of Love, teach me the true meaning of love.
The movie I went to see, with my friend Jane, was Zen. Based on the novel Life of Dogen by Tetsu Otani, this film (here's a good review) is a cinematic hagiography of the founder of the Soto school of Zen in Japan. I later described it to my husband as a kind of Brother Sun Sister Moon of the Zen lineage -- but it's not quite that romantic or cinematographically lavish. While it depicts the central character as committed, deeply compassionate, and unswervingly humble, it's a quieter, more spacious film that opens and blooms more slowly -- simultaneously unassuming and expansive.
There is one scene near the end [spoiler alert] depicting a tense interaction between Dogen and a shogun who is being persistently and disturbingly haunted by the ghosts of dead warriors. Dogen's suggestion that these ghosts are the immaterial products of a tortured imagination enrages the shogun, who threatens to kill Dogen if he does not retract his statement. But Dogen, who had made a special trip to minister to this anguished man, is fully prepared to die. Gathering himself, he sits down in a zazen pose and lowers his hood -- leaving his neck exposed -- as the shogun lifts his sword. The shogun pauses, then, in a powerful moment of clarity and contrition, is overcome. He throws aside his sword, sits down next to Dogen, and joins him in meditation.
Given my background, I could not help but see the similarities between this depiction of Dogen and the biblical Jesus: powerful stories about strong, humble masters who walk the talk of radical nonattachment and profound compassion. The Bodhisattvic and Incarnational Love that is ready to give everything, even its own be-ing, for the awakening and blooming of another.
So I've been letting this synchronicity -- reading Fr. Jude's reflection on true love and then viewing that dramatic moment in Zen -- sink in to my heart.
Am I able to love in this way? I would like to think that if and when the moment presents itself, I would readily die for another (or others), freely offer this ultimate expression of love. But in all honesty -- I am a long way from being so radically kenotic. That's for the best, I suppose. Or else I'd be all too willing to take the credit for this wild gift of the Spirit . . .
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