Falling In Love Teaches Us How to Meditate
Love at First Sight and Mahamudra
A version of this post originally appeared as an essay in the The Canelands magazine.
Hi y’all,
When my grandfather was a young man in seminary, he went with a friend to the train station to greet incoming students. A woman descended from one of the cars. She was ten years older than he was, heavy-set, and wearing a broad hat. My grandfather turned to his friend and said, “You see that woman over there? I’m going to marry that woman.” Three months later, my grandparents were married near an apple tree on a hill overlooking the seminary.
My mother told me this story not as a way to illustrate fate (which she didn’t believe in) or even love at first sight (which she was skeptical of). She’d been divorced once, and her partnership with my other mother was born out of friendship and practicality more than romantic love.
Although my grandparents remained in love the rest of their lives, my mother wanted to impart to me my grandfather’s preternatural sense of knowing. He saw his love with clarity, he knew with utter certainty. There was no evidence. He simply knew.
Love’s knowing arrives like the last rising tide of a symphony before a song closes. When I feel this love, I feel myself waking up.
Love at First Sight as Enlightened Wisdom
In Buddhism, this kind of insight arises from the clear awareness of mind, and is referred to as enlightened wisdom or prajna. During the years that I would often hear this family story, I was less impressed by my grandparents’ love than by my grandfather’s insight of that love, which spoke to his spiritual wisdom. My grandfather, Charlie, was not a Buddhist, but he was an excellent Dharma practitioner. His meditation was fishing, his Buddha a rabbi born in West Asia two thousand years ago.
My grandfather died before I was born, but I was raised on my mother’s stories about him. Charlie was a gifted minister who had grown up in extreme poverty and hardship in eastern North Carolina’s Outer Banks. They were poor whites living near brackish waters vulnerable to floods and hurricanes. My grandfather’s mother died of typhoid when he was two years old, and he was raised by his father and stepmother, both abusive alcoholics.
When Charlie ran away from home at age fourteen, it was early in the morning, before dawn. His father and stepmother were passed out drunk on the porch. He pissed in their ears before leaving.
Afterwards, he roamed the countryside, preaching on top of haystacks. His sermons were full of fire and brimstone, until he saw the woman on the train. She married him on the condition that he would stop scaring people. After her, his sermons changed. He preached kindness and love and forgiveness, the qualities which saved him from the bitter anger he had towards his abusive father and stepmother.
Charlie had a sense of altruism and what Christians call “inner poverty” that always impressed me. When he was seventy-eight, my mother gave him a dryer for his clothes so he wouldn’t have to hang them on a line. The next weekend she went to visit him. The dryer was gone. He’d given it to a woman who had seven children, sure that she would have more use for it than he did.
I don’t know what my grandfather would have made of my drift away from his version of Christianity. All I can say is that my Dharma practice has led me to a deeper understanding of Christianity, a far more mystical and contemplative tradition than it is given credit for. Growing up in the church, I found no method on how to practice some of Jesus’s thornier teachings, like loving your enemies and turning the other cheek. Theism perplexed me. Faith asked my analytical mind to contort itself around doubt and, sometimes, even inquiry.
What I longed for was the direct experience of prajna, enlightened wisdom. With Buddhism, it felt as though someone had overheard the quiet murmur of thoughts already in my mind and dared to speak them aloud. My teachers never insisted that I