Blown Away
"Like a plant that must be severely pruned in order to stimulate its most luxuriant blossoming, love requires its own ongoing tragedy to unfold the fullness of its beauty. This realisation of love takes place in the interior of our own souls, where nothing is completely lost." Richard Boothby
I’m currently reading Richard Boothby’s book ‘Blown Away’. Richard is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Maryland.
In this book, he shares his journey of grief and healing after his son Oliver took his own life at the age of 23, following a long struggle with drug addiction. Boothby explores the questions that haunted him after his son's death, such as why Oliver shot himself, whether he had an undiagnosed mental illness, and what he could have done to prevent it. He also recounts his experiences with psychoanalysis and psychedelic therapy, which helped him find a sense of acceptance and appreciation for life. Boothby's book is a poignant and honest account of how the loss of a loved one can transform us and bring us closer to them and ourselves.
"Like a plant that must be severely pruned in order to stimulate its most luxuriant blossoming, love requires its own ongoing tragedy to unfold the fullness of its beauty. This realisation of love takes place in the interior of our own souls, where nothing is completely lost."
It’s a fascinating and moving read and I find his reflections on the nature of God interesting:
“The usual understanding poses the divine as the endpoint, the destination of all cosmic journeying, the grand goal to which we are struggling. we are pilgrims on our way toward God. helped along at points by gifts of Grace…..
The correction hits like a violent gust of wind. God is not the destination, but the animating spirit of the journey itself. God exists only in and through the passage. The truth, at once confounding and exhilarating, is that God is not a completed, self-enclosed being, waiting eternally at the far side of some immense void. On the contrary, God himself is a work in progress, himself energised by the force of love and longing. Even God himself does not know what we will find on our voyage. And it is a matter of we.God isn’t waiting for us at a distance. He is right beside us. Or better, inside us. God sees with our eyes, hears with our ears, feels through our hearts. God comes to be through our seeing, hearing, and feeling - if only we really do see, and hear, and feel.”
This “is a vision of an incomplete God, a spirit of perfect openness to existence, the heartbeat of love in an unfolding drama of pure and infinite possibility.”
This expression of the nature of God is one that I resonate with in some measure. The journey of life seems to be one of participation in an infinitely larger journey, the evolutionary journey of the universe(s), in which God participates too, from the inside.