Scorching Sacred Love

Bhakti is not bedtime prayer in some safe enclave of the heart. Love of the divine isn't ornamental. It certainly isn't tame. And it most definitely isn't for the faint of heart

- Arundhathi Subramaniam

IF teddy bears and chocolate were the landscape of love, life would, of course, be gloriously simple. Also, a trifle vapid, but that’s another matter. The fact is that love is, and has always been, a sticky business. And not just vanilla sticky. Sticky in a bloody, snotty way. A living-and-dying kind of way. The problem is no one tells us so.

If the darker side of fairytales help prepare children for existential issues, ranging from terrors of abandonment to sibling rivalries, where are the adult almanacks for human love? Is greeting-card verse meant to do the trick? Is a movie like Animal meant to prepare us for the lurching cardiogram of romantic love? How do we understand what turns moonlight and roses into toxicity, betrayal and rejection? And what eventually enables love to ripen into wisdom?

Stories offer insight. But poems, I believe, go deeper. Poems offer insight more directly, swiftly and profoundly than stories ever can. Many years ago, when I began reading Indian sacred poetry, I found, to my amazement, that there was a wealth of insight here about how to navigate the darker tides of love. Why was this such a well-kept secret? Why had I grown up believing that our bhakti literature was all about pious saints looking rapturously heavenward? Why did I never hear the ferocity, the desperation, the erotic tensions, the yowl and ecstatic cry in their voices? Why had I believed that devotion was all about meek service at the lotus feet of despotic gurus and capricious deities? Why had I never been encouraged to hear the risk, the terror, the longing, the sheer sensual appetite for union and dissolution?

"My hair's come loose I dance like a madwoman"