What Love Needs

The Spiritual Possibility That Emerges With Suffering

The student said, “Dear teacher, tell me why must love and suffering, and friend and foe, coexist? Would it not be better to have only love?” The teacher said, “If love were not in suffering, it would have nothing that it could love. However, because love’s being, which it loves, is in suffering and pain, just like the poor soul, love has cause to love its own being, and to rescue it from pain, so that it may be loved again. Further, it cannot be known what love is, if it did not have something that it could love.”

Jakob Boehme (1575-1624) was a Lutheran mystic (that in itself is pretty remarkable) and theologian whose writings were controversial in his lifetime; living just a century after the Reformation, he followed the contemplative call at a time when mystical (personal) experience was held in suspicion by both Catholic and Protestant Christians. But over time he came to be regarded as one of the most important western mystics of his age, with William Blake, Evelyn Underhill, Carl Jung and Cynthia Bourgeault among the many who have been influenced by his wisdom.

We live in a world rife with suffering: this is the first of the Buddha’s four noble truths. Isn’t it tempting to wonder why this had to be so? Julian of Norwich goes there: she asks Christ point blank why sin had to exist. “I often wondered why the great foreseeing wisdom of God did not stop the start of sin, for then all would have been well, or so I thought,” she admits in chapter 27 of her Showings. Jesus’s response became the most quotable line in her book: “Sin happened, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and manner of things shall be well.”

But Boehme goes even further. Not only should we simply trust the reality of suffering, but we can rejoice that suffering makes it possible to meaningfully love. If there were no suffering, how meaningful would our love truly be? But there is suffering, which means we have abundant opportunities to love, to care, to bring healing and the alleviation of suffering to others — and to ourselves as well.

Source of the quotation: Jakob Boehme. Genius of the Transcendent: Mystical Writings of Jakob Boehme (p. 40). Kindle Edition.