Conscious Choice: Romantic Myths and Muses

February 2005

Romantic Myths and Muses

by Rev. Rebecca Armstrong

The couples cling and claw and drown in love’s debris. You say we’ll soar like two birds through the clouds, but soon you’ll cage me on your shelf, I’ll never learn to be just me first by myself. — from “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard it Should Be,” music by Carly Simon, lyrics by Jacob Brackman

I swim daily in the current of so-called Romantic Love. For 15 years I have work-ed as an interfaith minister, helping more than 500 couples create their own weddings, the ritual entrance to the path of marriage. But over the past three years I began helping couples on the way out make a graceful parting through the ritual of divorce.

You may think the latter is unusual for a minister. But I felt called to do this because I have seen the couples, not the lovers arm in arm, but lawyers and clients head to head in consultations. As some make their way to the legal battlefields, they leech emotional poisons into the common stream of humanity. Hating, condemning or wreaking emotional vengeance on another person may feel justified for the wounded Romantic, but it pollutes the psychic waters in which we all swim.

It seems we are overdue for some lessons in the spiritual ecology of Romantic Love.

Is Romantic Love a bad thing? Not at all. In the bright face of its arising, in the time of the troubadours, it held the freshest promise: that through the arduous art of courtly love one could begin to perceive the image of the divine in the merely human.

As tantric practice had done for the East, the West now had a method of linking the physical to the spiritual, an essential step in the redemption of the soul. Romantic Love promised to harness the fantastic energy of Eros and use it to lift the individual into spiritual ecstasy.

But, like all aging mythic images, Romantic Love has come to cast a very long and rather dark shadow. Its high ideals have been co-opted by the church, the state, society, commerce and the baser drives of human psychology, until one can hardly speak of its original trajectory without eliciting sneers and raised eyebrows.

The late, great mythologist, Joseph Campbell, was a close family friend and from my early teens I was privileged to call him “Uncle Joe.” He spoke often and with great passion about the Myth of Romantic Love, which was, for him, the foundational psychological insight of the West. Born out of the tumultuous period known as the Middle Ages, Romantic Love was, at first, a mythopoetic revelation formed from the meeting of minds of Christian and Muslim mystics in Spain and southern France. In the absence of warrior husbands, who left en masse to fight the Turks in the Crusades, the feminine spirit found room to expand, indeed explode, under the worshipful gaze of the poet-lovers, those men left behind to woo the newly empowered women. The essential troubadour spirit is reflected in these lines from the late 12th and early 13th centuries:

“Each day I am a better man and purer, for I serve the noblest lady in the world.” — Arnaut Daniel

“Lady, for your love I join my hands and worship.” — Bernart de Ventadorn

“To be in love is to reach toward heaven through a woman!” — Uc de Saint Circ

Romantic Love, at its core, is a spiritual insight.

As a tool, it is one of the most powerful we have for furthering the soul’s journey. But we have forgotten how to use it, and so it has become downright dangerous for us. Campbell’s interpretation of the role of Romantic Love in the West was its capacity to introduce the novel idea of particularity into the primal drive of lust, possession and procreation. “This one and no other,” is the cry of the true lover. This form of love, properly understood and experienced, unites the lower instincts with the energy of the heart (for the beloved) and of the mind (for the idea of love) and of the soul (for God).

Further, it introduces a kind of sensitivity to spiritual ecology of which I was unaware until I began to notice that of the couples who came to me for premarital counseling, those who professed to be soulmates, that is they recognized in one another a deep familiarity, a bond with the resonance of eternity immediately gravitated toward a sense of social responsibility in their wedding plans. It was not to merely celebrate their “us-ness” that they wanted a wedding, but to bless and extend the love to all who were present and even beyond their immediate circle.

Anyone can participate in this spiritual ecology of Romantic Love, wherever you are in the cycle: coupled, in crisis, uncoupling, resting in solitude or answering the call of love for the first time. It is our special task to sort through the perversions that have blinded us to the real meaning of this gift from our ancestors and take up, once again, the deep delights of reaching the One through devotion to “this One Only of the Many.”

Rev. Rebecca Armstrong has been ministering through myth and music for many years, including a decade with the Joseph Campbell Foundation. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago Divinity School and Chicago Theological Seminary and a practical ministerial degree from the Unitarian-Universalist seminary. For more information visit: www.revreb.com , or reach her by e-mail.

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: