All About Love
Page 17
As a nation, we need to gather our collective courage and face that our society’s lovelessness is a wound. As we allow ourselves to acknowledge the pain of this wound when it pierces our flesh and we feel in the depths of our soul a profound anguish of spirit, we come face to face with the possibility of conversion, of having a change of heart. In this way, recognition of the wound is a blessing because we are able to tend it, to care for the soul in ways that make us ready to receive the love that is promised.
Angels bring to us the knowledge of how we must journey on the path to love and well-being. Coming to us in both human form and as pure spirit they guide, instruct, and protect. Alice Miller chose to call the angelic force in an individual’s life the “enlightened witness.” To her, this was, in particular, any individual who offered hope, love, and guidance to a wounded child in any dysfunctional setting. Most folks who come from a conflict-ridden family or a setting that was lacking in love remember the individuals who offered sympathy, understanding, and at times a way out. Speaking of her mother’s “miserable childhood” Hillary Clinton remembers that “others outside the family circle stepped in, and their help made all the difference.” From childhood on, I found many of my angels in favorite authors, writers who created books that enabled me to understand life with greater complexity. These works opened my heart to compassion, forgiveness, and understanding. In her memoir Are You Somebody?, Irish journalist Nuala O’Faolain writes about the life-saving nature of books, declaring, “If there was nothing else, reading would—obviously—be worth living for.”
German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s autobiographical writing transformed my sense of self as a teenager. At a time when I felt like an outsider, unworthy and unwanted, his work gave me a way to see being an outsider as a place of creativity and possibility. In the concluding chapter of the memoir of my girlhood, Bone Black, I write: “Rilke gives meaning to the wilderness of spirit I am living in. His book is a world I enter and find myself. He tells me that everything terrible is really something helpless that wants help from us. I read Letters to a Young Poet over and over. I am drowning and it is the raft that takes me safely to the shore.” I received his book as a gift at a spiritual retreat. There I met a priest who worked as a chaplain at a nearby college. He was one of the featured speakers. Intuiting the depths of my despair, he offered me solace. I was in my teens and had begun to feel as though I could not go on living. Suicidal longings dominated my waking thoughts and my nightmares. I believed death would release me from the overwhelming sadness that weighed me down.
Listening to spiritual testimony at the retreat I felt even more sorrowful. I could not understand how everyone else could be lifted by divine spirit when I felt more and more alone, as though I was falling into an abyss without hope of rescue. I never asked Father B. what he saw when he looked at me or why I was chosen as one of the individuals he singled out for spiritual counseling. He touched my soul, offering to me (and to everyone he connected with) a loving spirit. In his presence I felt chosen, beloved. Like many earthly angels who visit us and touch our lives with their visionary power and healing wisdom, I never encountered him again. But I have never forgotten his presence, the gifts he offered to me—gifts of love and compassion freely given.
The presence of angels, of angelic spirits, reminds us that there is a realm of mystery that cannot be explained by human intellect or will. We all experience this mystery in our daily lives in some ways, however small, whether we see ourselves as “spiritual” or not. We find ourselves in the right place at the right time, ready and able to receive blessings without knowing just how we got there. Often we look at events retrospectively and can trace a pattern, one that allows us to intuitively recognize the presence of an unseen spirit guiding and directing our path.
When I was a young girl, I would lie in my attic bed and talk endlessly with divine spirit about the nature of love. Then, I did not imagine I would ever have the courage to speak about love without the solitary covering of secrecy or night. Like Jacob, wandering alone by the stream, in the stillness of my pitch-dark room I grappled with the metaphysics of love, seeking to understand love’s mystery. That grappling continued until my awareness intensified and a new vision of love came to me. Now I recognize that I was engaged from then until now in a disciplined spiritual practice—opening the heart. It led me to become a devout seeker on love’s path—to talk with angels face to face unafraid.
Understanding all the ways fear stands in the way of our knowing love challenges us. Fearful that believing in love’s truths and letting them guide our lives will lead to further betrayal, we hold back from love when our hearts are full of longing. Being loving does not mean we will not be betrayed. Love helps us face betrayal without losing heart. And it renews our spirit so we can love again. No matter how hard or terrible our lot in life, to choose against lovelessness—to choose love—we can listen to the voices of hope that speak to us, that speak to our hearts—the voices of angels. When angels speak of love they tell us it is only by loving that we enter an earthly paradise. They tell us paradise is our home and love our true destiny.
Quotations Are Reprinted From
Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart, Shambhala Publications, 1994
Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of Love, Random House, 1994
Judith Viorst, Necessary Losses, Simon & Schuster, 1986
John Welwood, Love and Awakening, HarperCollins, 1996
M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled, Simon & Schuster, 1978
Tessa Bielecki, Holy Daring, Element Inc., 1994
Marianne Williamson, The Healing of America, Simon & Schuster, 1977
Sharon Salzberg, A Heart As Wide As the World, Shambhala Publications, 1997
Parker Palmer, The Active Life, HarperCollins, 1990
Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love, Doubleday, 1996
Thomas Merton, Love and Liking, Commonweal Publishing, 1997
About the Author
bell hooks is a cultural critic, feminist theorist, and writer. Celebrated as one of our nation’s leading public intellectuals by The Atlantic Monthly, as well as one of Utne Reader’s “100 Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life,” she is a charismatic speaker who divides her time among teaching, writing, and lecturing around the world. Previously a professor in the English departments at Yale University and Oberlin College, hooks is the author of more than seventeen books, including All About Love: New Visions; Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work; Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life; Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood; Killing Rage: Ending Racism; Art on My Mind: Visual Politics; and Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life. She lives in New York City.
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Praise for bell hooks’s All About Love
“It is a warm affirmation that love is possible and an attack on the culture of narcissism and selfishness.”
—New York Times Book Review
“A gracefully written volume . . . her treatise offers a deeply personal and—in this age of chicken-soupy psychobabble—unabashedly honest view of relationships.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Her vision seems idealistic . . . ambitious. Yet it touches a yearning we all have and is expressed so sincerely . . . . hooks’s New Visions reminds us that we can be a part of a loving community.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“Pay attention to bell hooks. The American writer and cultural critic is becoming a household word . . . hooks’s writing typically inspires, enlightens and provokes. She is an academic wild card, the brilliant feminist whose sharp mind can slice the latest scholarly shibboleth.”
—Boston Globe and Mail
“She provides a refreshing spiritual treatise that steps outside the confines of the intellect and into the wilds of the heart.”
—Seattle Weekly
“Every page offers useful nuggets of wisdom to aid the reader in overcoming the fears of total intimacy and of loss
. . . . hooks’s view of amour is ultimately a pleasing, upbeat alternative to the slew of books that proclaim the demise of love in our cynical time.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A spiritual handbook, weighty with platitudes, yet refreshed with some thoughtful analyses that offer seekers a way to explore love’s meaning, or meaningless.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“All About Love: New Visions promises to be one of the most engaging, life-affirming reads of the year. Come to it with an open mind, and an open heart, and prepare to be transformed.”
—Black Issues Book Review
“Like love, this book is worth the commitment.”
—Toronto Sun
Also by bell hooks
Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work
A Woman’s Mourning Song
Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life
Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies
Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood
Killing Rage: Ending Racism
Art on My Mind: Visual Politics
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations
Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery
Black Looks: Race and Representation
Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (with Cornel West)
Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics
Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black
Feminist Theory from Margin to Center
Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
Copyright
ALL ABOUT LOVE. Copyright © 2000 by Gloria Watkins. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2000 by William Morrow and Company, Inc.
FIRST HARPER PERENNIAL PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2001.
FIRST WILLIAM MORROW PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2018.
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover image © flovie/Shutterstock
* * *
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Hooks, Bell.
All about love : new visions / Bell Hooks
p. cm.
ISBN 0-688-16844-2
1. Love. 2. Feminist ethics I. Title.
BF575.L8 H655 2000 99-35253
306.7‒dc21 CIP
* * *
Digital Edition JANUARY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-062-86217-4
Version 01092018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-095947-0 (pbk.)
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