Fresh Rain

The Blessed Hurt

by Ihsan Chris Covey

Today I saw several new-fallen trees in the nearby forest that is slowly dying.  I saw the mangled form of a majestic pronghorn antelope on the roadside after colliding with a car.  I read about oil wars, about the collapse of the Atlantic current and predicted temperatures in India above 50ºC this summer.  But I also saw an iridescent emerald hummingbird fly up to my window and hover for a few seconds to let me know its feeder was running low.  I heard the echoes of birdsong and wind in the pines.  I saw clouds swollen with rain and a child laughing with his brother in the grocery store.  I can’t help loving this world, even as it vanishes.

Love comes disguised as the blessed hurt that opens us into more of what we are by breaking our hearts and spilling out their secret vulnerable contents, again and again.  In speaking of love, Sufis have never stopped at its sweetness and bliss.  Instead, they delve further into the endless ways love hurts; the way it shatters, burns, rips, melts, cuts, crushes, drowns, and completely annihilates our conditioned expectations and self-delusions. 

They speak of the pain of love as an executioner, a slaughterhouse, a moth extinguished in a flame, a scorching desert, a seal of scars, exile from one’s homeland, the thorns of a rose, thirst that can’t be quenched, drowning in the ocean, grapes that must be pressed and broken so their hidden sweetness becomes wine, and a lover squeezed by adversity so the inner essence of the heart can flow. 

Yet they also dare us to continue pouring our love into this fragile, disappearing world, knowing there is nothing we can save or keep for ourselves.

Inayat Khan’s zikr-prayer, “Ishq Allah, ma’bud Allah!”—God is Love, Lover, and Beloved—is a cry from our depths to remember that whichever way we turn, whatever and whomever we encounter, we cannot be outside of the Only Being’s embrace.  Nothing is excluded. 

In our lives, the intensity of this Ishq-love becomes “the fire for which we are wood”.  Behind all our breaking down and rebuilding, unfolding and unfurling, Ishq steadily burns away whatever is not alive, everything but the Real. It consumes our limited ideas, our secret bargains for safety and attention, our fragile war-mongering egos like dry wood in a kiln.  It draws us out of ourselves and connects us with the depths of being and all life besides.  And as often as we sing of its sweetness, union, light, and peace, Ishq also comes as loss, as declining faculties, as the chair no longer occupied, as prayers that seem to return with no answer but their own echo.

What we love delivers the necessary blows to our hearts, so that they may remain open.  If we are willing, we can welcome each heartache as a hidden initiation. When sorrow comes, or the dull ache of longing, instead of rushing to decorate it or push it away, we simply stay with its rawness, even when we crave instant answers or spiritual shortcuts. We embrace the not‑knowing and let it work on us: in disappointment, love may be stripping away our fantasies; in loneliness, love may be teaching us how profoundly we belong to something larger than our immediate surroundings; in grief, love may be loosening our grip on forms so we can recognize the Beloved’s fragrance in places we never expected.

Yes, love hurts. Not because it is cruel, but because it is real. It will not leave our defenses untouched. If we accept its invitation, it will not let our illusions stay intact or our hearts stay hardened—an unbroken heart cannot truly receive or give.  And yet, even in our dark nights of longing, even in the ashes of our losses, something still glows. The same fire of Ishq that scorches us is the fire that lights our way home.

Sometimes I wonder—is all this Love too much to bear?  But for now, my little emerald hummingbird is back—this time with friends—and I can’t help but smile.