Beauty and The Beast ~ Learning to Love

Greetings Dear Reader,

The fulcrum for the story is that the beast does not love others as he should.  He is cursed by the Enchantress that he remain a beast until he learns to love to the degree that someone loves him in return.  It is this that is the golden vein of the tale.  In this challenge lies the journey that we all must take and so the richness of the tale. 

There were few examples of love in my upbringing.  My parents divorced before I was aware that I had a father.  He did not come into my life more than a few times and those all ended badly.  I have long since forgiven him but his minor presence did enough damage to mark me always. 

The combination of my parents and their actions harmonized to ignite an anger in me as a boy that soon burned away peace and love in my heart.  I learned quickly how to appear as others wished to see me but the coals of that bonfire of anger always smoldered.  My attempts to control that which lurked inside of me caused me to control others in an outer layer of hedging that they could not understand. 

It was never about control for the sake of using others.  It was how I kept that lurker at bay within me.  It worked inside me but I was not loving others as I should even though it was my love for them that moved me to protect them from myself and try to find a belief that I could be loved. 

When things would come undone due to my blindness to my impact on others, I would feel betrayed.  I was still not loving others as I should.  It took the hardest of rejections by someone who had always shown me, love, to begin to see that I had to confront the darkness and allow the Father to love me.  I had to come to the place where I did not seek to be loved, but rather, sought to love others without expectation or condition. 

I am not there yet, Dear Reader.  I have many miles to go, pouring out the parts of me that are selfish and self-centered.  As I work at loving others and cease pursuing being loved, I find that I see the genuine love of others when it is there.  As I have been honest about my dark struggle, there are those who love me more deeply. 

It becomes clear that this is why Christ insists that we all love the Father and others without condition or expectation.  It is the power of love that crushes our fear, selfishness, anger, and pain.  It is what fuels our ability to forgive even the deepest wrongs.  We may begin with things that drive us to be beasts, but love, given freely drives that out, rebuilds our hearts and allows us to see that love that others have for us when we set them free to do so.  The journey home is too long for me to take another step that is not founded in love for others.

Wishing you joy in the journey, 

Aramis Thorn
Mat 13:52 So Jesus said to them, "That is why every writer who has become a disciple of Christ’s rule of the universe is like a homeowner. He liberally hands out new and old things from his great treasure store.”
(͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Every human story is part of the great story that leads to the Father getting everything back to Good.

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