Idiotic Love

Response to prompt #34--Sentimental Education

This may seem cliche--so cliche in fact, I hesitated to write it--but reading (and watching, because that's what we did back in the 80's) Romeo and Juliet in 9th grade taught me everything I needed to know about love, but not in the I-want-to-go-out-and-find-someone-who-I'd-rather-die-than-be-without kind of way.

I thought they were idiots.

I mean, who meets someone, falls madly in love, marries, and dies all within the span of 3 short days?

I, of course, boyfriendless, didn't understand that take-my-breath-away feeling of true love, and I wasn't sure I wanted to. I watched and listened to my girlfriends pine away over boys (and a couple of over 18 men who should have probably been arrested). And then cry over them when it all fell apart. At least their relationships lasted more than three days, but I grew tired of hearing about their self-inflicted drama.

I remember thinking that I would never let one person control my emotions so completely. It didn't seem that love should operate like that. I wanted to be with someone who loved me without conditions, someone who wouldn't manipulate me, someone who would respect me.

The immaturity of Romeo and Juliet was mirrored throughout the halls of Dunedin High. Couples were either making out with their tongues down each others' throats or were slamming locker doors as they fought. Emotions ran high on the daily. Ridiculous, I thought.

It's not that I look back at Romeo and Juliet with disdain. I enjoyed reading it. I think I even sympathized with their plight--I just didn't agree with the way they handled it, and I never really thought about why until now.

Love isn't meant to cause us pain and suffering, grief and strife. Love is meant to be a balm for our wounds, a healing force in a sick world. Does loving someone come with some emotional turmoil at times? Sure. But, is that disquiet supposed to be the norm? Nope.

Thanks, dear Romeo and Juliet, for teaching me about the kind of love I didn't want.

The Power of Pure Love

Response to #34. Sentimental Education


The Power of Pure Love 
by Helen Sadler

As a girl growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, I was a regular reader.  I didn’t just read during the school year but all year round, as I was aware this was a worthwhile and valuable activity.  Consequently, I spent my early years reading series books about ordinary girls: Beatrice and Ramona by Beverly Cleary and Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder stand out to me the most.  I loved those books for the daily life they represented. In Cleary’s books, it was the follies of a little sister. With Wilder’s books, I was taken to another time and place, in what I now understand is historical fiction. At the time I was a lover of geography, so learning about life on the Great Plains at that time was exciting.

Then I entered fifth grade, and sometime during that year a librarian recommended a book by Madeleine L’Engle called A Wrinkle in Time.  I checked the book out, and from the first words, “It was a dark and stormy night…” I was hooked.  I immediately became attached the dorky and awkward Meg Murry, her strange little brother, the even stranger spirits that show up to guide her back to her father.  It was my first step into science fiction, away from ordinary time and space, and I couldn’t get enough.  I loved the writing and the book so much, I sought out other books L’Engle had written with the character of Meg, one in particular called The Moon By Night.  The problem was all those books took place in ordinary time and space.  It didn’t have the magic of Wrinkle. Later L’Engle would create a series based on A Wrinkle in Time, but that was after I was well into high school.  All I had in 1965 was the Newbery Award Winner from 1963.

The cover of the book I read

For thirty years I remembered Meg and A Wrinkle of Time with great fondness, often naming it as my most favorite book.  It wasn’t until a decided to re-read the book while taking an Adolescent Literature course (with Pat Wachholz) that I picked it up again.

As it happens, there was so much in the book I didn’t remember, probably because I didn’t understand it at all. Like when Mrs Whatsit explains to Meg that life is like a sonnet – it has strict rules, but there is plenty of freedom within it.  Or  that the dog Fortinbras got his name from Shakespeare.  And I was really taken by surprise with the amount of Christian language and quotes from the New Testament. I attended Catholic school, so I guess I didn’t find it unusual at age 10.  But I sure did as an adult. Since then I have read many of L’Engle’s memoirs, and I know she is a devout Episcopalian.  Most of what she writes has a Christian slant to it.

But what floored me the most was the ending when Meg has to save her brother Charles Wallace against the evil force of IT he had succumbed to simply by feeling her love for him.

“I love you, Charles!” she cried again, her sobs almost as loud as his, her tears mingling with his. “I love you! I love you! I love you!”

A whirl of darkness.  An icy cold blast. An angry, resentful howl that seemed to tear through her. Darkness again. Through the darkness to save her came a sense of Mrs Whatsit’s presence, so that she knew it could not be IT who now had her in its clutches.

And then the feel of earth beneath her, of something in her arms, and she was rolling over on the sweet-smelling autumnal earth, and Charles Wallace was crying out, “Meg! Oh, Meg!”

Now she was hugging him close to her, and his little arms were clasped tightly around her neck. “Meg, you saved me! You saved me!” he said over and over. (201)

I realized that this message had sunk into me at the beautiful age of 10, the age Clarissa Pinkola Estes says we are most purely ourselves.  The idea that love is all that is needed to defeat any kind of evil has never left my mind.  I believe that is why I found it so easy to understand A Course in Miracles when I studied it, because the entire book is a lesson on how only love is real.  Hundreds of pages to get that across – but L’Engle did it with children’s book just 202 pages long.

Later I would fall in love deeply with two other books that I think may have much of the same message, but have male protagonists and different approaches: The Outsiders and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  The characters of Meg, Ponyboy, and Huck have never left my side.  I am grateful, however, that Meg, being a girl, was the first to bring me into my deepest idealism and belief – Love has real power.  Love has real presence.  Love is always available. We can think of all kinds of ways it doesn’t. We can be like Ponyboy and think his brother doesn’t love him. We can be like Huck and follow cultural conventions even when we feel it is wrong, rationalizing ourselves away from love.  But the real truth is that no matter what IT is, love can conquer.  We just have to activate it on any dark and stormy night.

***

I wanted to get this written today because next week I am going with Amy to see the movie.  It promises to have many changes, and that is fine with me.  In the 1980’s, I refused to see The Outsiders movie because I didn’t want my memory of it ruined.  (I eventually watched the film, and I still reject it!)  And I tried to watch a Huck Finn movie once that was spittin’ awful. 

I will go into A Wrinkle in Time knowing that the chosen characters will not be ones I’d be familiar with back on the west side of (white) Cleveland in the twentieth century.  It will feature a Meg who will represent many of the young girls today.  Probably some things will be changed; I’ll go along for the ride.

My deepest prayer is that the principle of the power of love in the face of any kind of danger or circumstance is clear and present.  Here in 2018, we need this message more than ever. I pray that girls walk out of that theater (and boys, too) with a new seed planted inside, much like was planted in me: Love is a powerful force constantly available to us, one we tend to dismiss or under-utilize, and is always the answer to any challenge we face.

Always.