Order of Love

Love will triumph ?

Many people assume that if we only love enough, love will triumph and everything will turn out well. Experience shows this isn't true. Sometimes parents must watch helplessly as their children, although deeply loved, turn out differently than they hoped, perhaps becoming ill or addicted to drugs or tragically committing suicide. Such experiences show that, in addition to love, something else is necessary for love to succeed. What love requires is that we understand and follow the hidden Orders of Love.

Order and Love

Love fills what the Orders contain.
Love is water, the Orders her jug.

The Orders are the holding,
allowing love to flow.

Order and Love cooperate:
Like a melody with its harmonies,
so love with its Orders.

Just as our ear is grated by dissonance,
even when explained,
so too our soul adjusts with difficulty
to Love without order.

Some treat the Orders as if they
were opinions which we can
have or change at will.

But they are as they are.
They work, even when we do not understand them.
We do not create them, we discover them.
We conclude them, like Meaning and Soul,
from their effect.

Many of these orders are hidden and we cannot observe them directly. They work deeply in the soul, and we tend to obscure them with our beliefs, objections, desires or anxieties. We need to reach deeply into the soul if we want to touch the Orders of Love.

Taking life as it is given

I'd like to begin by saying something about the Orders of Love between parents and children from the child's perspective. These observations are so fundamental and obvious that I hesitate to mention them at all, but they are nevertheless often forgotten.

When parents give life, they act in deepest accordance with their humanness, and they give themselves as parents to their children exactly as they are. They can't add anything to what they are, nor can they leave anything out. Father and mother, consummating their love for one another, give to their children the whole of what they are. Thus, the first of the Orders of Love is that children take life as it was given. A child cannot leave anything out from the life he or she was given, nor does wishing it were different change anything.

A child IS its parents. Love, if it is to succeed, requires that a child affirms its parents as they are, without fear and without imagining it could have different parents. After all, different parents would have had different children. Our parents are the only possible ones for us. Imagining anything else to be possible is an illusion.

Bert Hellinger