On the Discipline of Small Love
> To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do.
> — Hermann Hesse
For years I read this as moral exhortation. Be nicer. Try harder. I no longer read it that way.
The Gospel of Philip says that ignorance is the root of all error, and that whoever has knowledge of the truth is free — but it does not stop there. It says knowledge without love is nothing. The two have to be married. There is a passage where the disciples grow jealous of how often Christ kisses Mary, how much he favors her, and his answer is essentially: why would I not? The kiss, in that text, is not romance. It is how the perfect conceive — how spirit is exchanged mouth to mouth, person to person. Love is not the reward of gnosis. Love is the delivery mechanism.
That reframes Hesse for me. Holding my tongue when everyone is gossiping is not restraint for its own sake. It is refusing to let a small moment become another mouth that delivers poison instead of spirit. Every exchange is a kind of kiss, in Philip's sense — it transmits something. I get to choose what.
~
Thunder, Perfect Mind — that strange, riddling voice that speaks as if it were both the soul and the divine source at once — says something I cannot get out of my head: do not despise me because I am small and little, for the small things are known through the great ones, and the great ones are known through the small. Do not turn away when you find me cast among the disgraced, in the least places.
Except from Thunder Perfect Mind
I was sent forth from the power,
- and I have come to those who reflect upon
- and I have been found among those who seek after me
Look upon me, you who reflect upon me, - and you hearers, hear me.
- You who are waiting for me, take me to yourselves.
And do not banish me from your sight.
And do not make your voice hate me, nor your hearing.
- Do not be ignorant of me anywhere or any time. Be on your guard!
- Do not be ignorant of me.
For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am <the mother> and the daughter.
I am the members of my mother.
I am the barren one
I think this is the actual register Hesse is writing in, whether he knew it or not. The world's love-shortage will not be solved by a grand gesture. It is solved — if it is solved at all — in the dung-heap moments: the gossip I decline to join, the criticism I decline to make, the patience I extend when irritation would be easier and more satisfying. Thunder insists those are not the minor leagues of spiritual life. They are where the divine has hidden itself, specifically so that I cannot reach it by any route except attention to what's small.
§
> The light of unconditional love awakens the dormant seed potentials of the soul, helping them ripen, blossom, and bear fruit, allowing us to bring forth the unique gifts that are ours to offer in this life.
> — John Welwood
Welwood's seed and the old Valentinian image of the divine spark are, I am fairly sure, the same thing wearing different clothes. The myth holds that a fragment of the divine fell into matter and now sleeps there, forgetting itself, until something wakens it — not creates it, *wakens* it. Unconditional love, Welwood says, is what does the waking. It does not install gifts in me that weren't there. It warms what was already planted and asleep.
This tells me something about my own resistance to vulnerability with other men, the place I keep circling back to in this work. If the gift is already seeded and only needs warmth to ripen, then my fear of rejection is not protecting an absence — there is no emptiness to be exposed. It is protecting a presence from the very thing that would let it grow. The spark does not need my defense. It needs my willingness to be looked at.
§
> Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.
> — Fyodor Dostoevsky
This instruction sounds almost Hermetic to me now. The old texts speak of the pleroma, the fullness, scattered like light through the cosmos, so that the All is somehow present in each thing without ceasing to be the All. To love the particular sparrow or the particular weed is not a detour from loving God. It is the only road there is. There is no shortcut through abstraction.
§
> And so let us always meet each other with a smile, for the smile is the beginning of love, and once we begin to love each other naturally we want to do something.
> — Mother Teresa
I read this now as the most monastic line of the four, because monastic life has never claimed that love starts as feeling. It starts as practice, repeated until it becomes disposition. The desert fathers did not wait to feel loving before they served the next brother who came to the door. They served, and the love that Welwood and Dostoevsky and Thunder all promise was waiting underneath caught up with them later — or didn't, and they served anyway, faithfully, in the aridity, because that too is part of the discipline.
§
That is the whole instruction, I think, gathered into one practice: smile first, hold the tongue first, do the small private kindness first — not because the feeling has arrived, but because the feeling is the seed, and these are the only acts that have ever been known to wake it.
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