It is interesting how, in love and friendship, we can be infatuated and obsessively drawn to someone who is very different from ourselves – into whose heart we can never sail as into a safe harbour. It can be exciting and titillating being with that person. Perhaps, as in cases of infatuation, we might even need obsessively to be with that person, like a drug addict needs a fix.
But in the end, in spite of the excitement and obsession, after we have had our fix we need to, and want to, go home. That person’s heart can never, ultimately, be home for us.
Given the complexities of the human heart, we can be obsessed with someone, painfully and hopelessly, and yet in that relationship not be at our right place in the universe. In the end our completeness, real love, home, lies elsewhere.
But the heart needs to be scrutinized carefully before it will tell us that. It has, as Pascal said, its reasons.
Yet at a certain level it rings true and will tell us where our true rest lies, namely at that place where we do not have to impress or perform, or earn or win, where we feel safe and secure and where we are at home.
Ronald Rolheiser
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