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One of the long-established emblems of Valentine's Day is the plump little cupid with his bow, or a stylized heart pierced through with an arrow. As clichéd as these images are, their source lies in ancient myth, and myths can offer us jewels of truth wrapped in allegory.

Cupid was the Roman name for the Greek boy-god Eros, who fell in love with the beautiful Psyche. Their story has some real things to say to us, not only about romantic love, but about any love that must progress from an overly idealized state to a more mature relatedness.

Eros falls in love with the beautiful psyche, but is thwarted by the complication that he is divine and she is mortal. He becomes Psyche's lover on the condition that she must never attempt to see his face. She is swept away from the mundane world by the zephyrs, the wind gods, to live in an alabaster tower upon a mountain top, her every need catered to. Eros visits her only at night under the cover of the darkness.

Doubt and curiosity begin to gnaw at Psyche as to who this mysterious being is. One night, when she can't stand it any longer, she breaks the rule. Taking an oil lamp to look upon him as he sleeps, she spills some drops of burning oil upon his naked shoulder. He startles awake, he realizes that he has been seen, and he immediately takes wing, fleeing through the window, abandoning her-or so it seems.

Psyche goes searching for him, but she must undergo a series perilous trials set for her by the merciless goddess Venus. With great effort and courage and the aid of a few unexpected allies, Psyche accomplishes her tasks and is eventually reunited with Eros, but this time face-to-face, and their relationship is allowed to proceed in the full light of day.

The word "eros" has come to express the idea of the human energy of love; "psyche" is the term for individual consciousness. The allegory says something about what the path of conscious relationship may entail:

That for love to evolve and flourish, it must move from shadow into light, it must awaken from a blissful dream to an actual path of effort and true knowledge. The myth reveals that the path of love is a most difficult one, and yet the reward for that labor is the possibility of true communion.

You may at this moment want to bring to your heart and mind any relationship with which you may have been struggling, or which you experience as a path.

All of us are in many relationships of the heart-not only with a spouse or companion or lover, but with children, brothers or sisters, parents, friends, even people with whom we work or whom we serve in our professions, our avocations, and our ministries to the larger world. Any context, any endeavor to which we wish to bring our heart offers an entrance onto the path of conscious love.

For example, the work of peacemaking between alienated groups holds many similarities to the work of intimate relationship. Both involve undertaking a difficult journey from a mindset of conditioned misconceptions and self-serving projections to place of naked encounter with the real-the real other, and the real self.

Both self and other must be known in all their paradox and complexity, their brokenness, and their beauty. Such true knowledge makes true relationship and true peace a possibility. If we seek to live lives that express a growing capacity to love, then we are called from the dream of love to the path of love.

When we are in an early, idealized stage of love, we are like Psyche, who has never actually seen her beloved's face, or we are like Eros, who does not want to be seen. Love and consciousness have not fully met. This can be a time of blissful illusion, often aided by a great deal of mutual courtesy and deference.

We may experience the feeling that our soul has been reawakened by the relationship, and that the other person is the source of all these great feelings, when really it is our own willingness to be openhearted that is the source of the joy and vitality we feel. We project onto the other our internal ideal, a fantasy of fulfillment. We imagine it is the other who can provide it, who will keep that good feeling coming.

The thing that's beautiful and important about this experience is that all that powerful energy is real, but it's our own energy. All that beauty is real, because we have eyes to see it and senses willing to be moved. All that vision and idealism are the experience of our own soulfulness awakened. And so that experience should be cherished, whatever its catalyst: a romance, or the presence of a new baby in our lives, or the beginning of an exciting new venture-even becoming part of a church community can evoke some of those feelings.

But as we all know, the dreaminess only lasts so long. We can't actually live in the alabaster tower, and eventually something happens that creates a shock, an abrasive encounter between our ideal and the reality. Eros and Psyche finally see each other. Love wakes up, is burned into wakefulness, meets Consciousness.

We see the other, and are seen, in the harsh light of human failing. Our expectations chafe against the reality of human flaw, brokenness, limitation, callousness. The illusion is shattered, the heart closes-Eros flees, we may feel abandoned, betrayed, or at the very least disappointed.

I have a colleague who had the chutzpah to deliver a sermon titled: "Welcome to First Parish-We're Sure to Disappoint You!" And, its true, isn't it? Somewhere along the way, we are sure to experience or deliver disappointment, because churches are people too.

And so love enters a state of disillusion. Dis-illusion. Love is stripped of its illusions. We've all been in this painful place many times throughout our lives.

But it also creates an opening. It breaks something open in us if we let it. As in the passage in the Gospel of John 8:32-"You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free"-disillusion creates a new space where something more real can be discovered.

Carla Needleman is an artist who writes about the state of disillusion in the practice of working with her craft and in the process creating. Her reflection on the opportunity created by disillusion fits here as well. She writes:

Disillusion is an extraordinarily interesting state of being. ... It is a sacred state, a state that has power. … [If we] can bear to stay there, not turn away, [we begin] to detect an opening in [our self] through which [we] can learn. Disillusion, the recognition that I am not what I thought I was, that I don't know what I thought I knew, that I cannot do what I wish to do, opens us to the creative dialogue. It renders [us], strains [us] through a very fine cloth to rid [us] of impurities so that [we] can be available to be worked upon. Disillusion is the first appearance in us of a different level of understanding. The experience of disillusion stops thought. And with the screen of associations quieted, only then, the mind is receptive to what lies outside its own closed circle, and can experience a moment of more precise knowledge.

But who wants to be disillusioned? Who goes there willingly? It's a shattered place to be. Once we are forced to go there, can we do as she counsels? Can we stay there intentionally, not turn away, keep ourselves available, let ourselves be rendered, strained through a fine cloth? Can we let ourselves be profoundly worked upon?

From my own experience, I would say that the path of love requires faith, most particularly in this place of disillusionment. To say it is too easy, to do it is not. But the path of love is spiritual work. Passing through this valley is spiritual work, and one needs faith in order to endure it.

We have to be able to touch something deeper than and bigger than our former illusion about our self and our illusions about the other. Without trust in something bigger than our notions we will not be able to let those notions be stripped away. We will keep holding on to them. We will not be able let ourselves be broken open.

The path of love requires faith, faith in the resources of a deeper, larger self, and faith in the possibility-indeed, the promise-of fuller connection with the world once we have let ourselves encounter the real. But how do we connect with that larger Self?

As I was exploring this subject I turned to the work of John Welwood, a psychologist who comes from a Buddhist perspective. He has written many insightful books about relationship, including Toward a Psychology of Awakening, and Journey of the Heart, which was quoted in our reading this morning.

His work is grounded in the Buddhist understanding of the mind. Buddhism distinguishes between the conditioned contents of the mind on the one hand, and the untarnished nature of pure mind itself. According to Buddhist teaching, all of us, simply by virtue of our being human, contain both-conditioned mind and Buddha mind. Ultimately, we are all Buddha.

If, as you are sitting here in the sanctuary, you were simply to observe the thoughts flittering through your mind, you could ask yourself who, or what, is the observer of those thoughts. As we relax deeper into ourselves, we begin to touch upon something that is beneath passing thoughts and feelings, a field of awareness that is peaceful, a calm ocean beneath the surface waves.

The practice of meditation helps the seeker distinguish between his or her transient thoughts and feelings, and the pure awareness that observes those sensations. Practice can eventually lead one to experience a radiant, spacious, untarnished dimension of Being.

Or we could take the theological angle that comes from our Judeo-Christian roots, or from the mystics of East and West. We could say that because we are an expression of the image of God, we have within us a core essence that is divine in nature, like a taproot that is always sunk deep down into the source of all being, a sacred aspect of self that is not of the world, and at its deepest layer cannot be harmed by the world; an aspect of self that is deeper than the ego or personality.

We sang about this place when we sang, "You shall be like a garden, like a deep spring where waters never fail…."

If we have ever been blessed with even one person whose loving gaze and interest mirrored back to us our beautiful sacred self, then we received a gift beyond measure. We might imagine that that person was the source of that wonderful feeling of love, yet what the person was actually doing was showing us what was and always has been and always is most deeply true about us.

If we were not so fortunate as to have that loving reflection, and were inevitably subjected to the many forces that injure or distort our sense of self, then touching into the sacred beauty within can be much more difficult. But it is not impossible. Every spiritual tradition in human history attests to this sacred dimension of being.

By whatever path we come to understand this unconditioned self, to touch down into it is to experience a profound beauty and stillness within, something that is always there, even though we are unconscious of it most of the time. Touching that place is what allows us to know self-love. It gives a powerful peace, enabling us to feel compassion for our own and others' limitations and struggles, making it possible for us to accept and endure the more harrowing passages on the path of love.

John Welwood tells a story in his book Journey of the Heart about getting into an argument with his wife. They're really angry at each other and have retreated to separate places in their house to stew. A bit later, they encounter each other in the hallway. As they approach each other, they're eyeing each other warily, wondering what's going to happen.

He describes vacillating feelings. One part of him wants to drop the whole thing and embrace her. Life is too short to get caught up in these conflicts! But somehow that is too easy, and not real. It doesn't honor the importance of the rupture or the reality of the difficult feelings.

Part of him wants to get into the argument all over again, reasserting his position and insisting that she see legitimacy of his anger and his perspective. But he knows that doesn't do justice to the full reality either.

Reaching out to embrace her would collapse the instructive gap that was created by their conflict. Arguing, on the other hand, makes their two stances more rigid and entrenched, keeping them alienated. He knows that neither option speaks for the whole of either of them. They stand there, not knowing what comes next. Not knowing.

That not knowing becomes the luminous, learning space offered by disillusionment.

They find a way to hold that space-I love you and I'm angry at you-and gradually something begins to shift. They make contact with something very alive, beneath the conflict, and beneath the anxious desire to prematurely reunite. A bittersweet poignancy emerges. They soften, they find a new entrance into conversation, and they find themselves laughing. They start to playfully call each other names, expressing the anger and affection simultaneously.

It takes faith to be able to go into that place and stay there for a while-stay in the disillusion, the not knowing, the undefended openness to what is paradoxical and real. One has to believe in something deeper and bigger than what is familiar.

I do admit that very often this process is not as mutual as the one described in this story. When only one party is willing to open and the other is not, there may not be a chance of full meeting in that relationship. That is a loss, particularly for the one who is unwilling.

Full connection in a specific relationship does require mutuality. But a commitment to the path of love as a life path does not, necessarily. As we do the work in ourselves, we are able to meet the world and all our relationships more consciously, more fully, with the full resources of our heart's depth.

During the offertory, we heard a piece by Ravel called "Conversations between Beauty and the Beast." It's one of those wonderful, unexpected serendipities that happens sometimes in worship, because I had found this quote from Welwood, which I'd like to offer as we move toward a closing:

To walk upon the path of love-the path of awakening and transformation-is the greatest expression of "yes."

As we walk the path of love as a community, we learn to turn to the powerful resources of spirit and faith that give us the strength to open more deeply to ourselves and to others. We find the courage to experience periods of disillusion and learn from them. By doing this work, we move toward the promise that shines before us on the path: the promise that a fuller communion is possible, that conscious, joyful, real relationship is possible, and that we can create it together.

May it be so.