Bound by Convention

I'm not very conventional. I tend to walk to my own beat, along with a few others. I don't really feel that bound by convention in many ways, and in other ways I am. When I'm at work though, there is very little convention here. There are no limits on what we can do and there are especially no limits on who we love.

When we talk about love in society, the focus we put on love, the boundaries we want to hold it to, are the bounds of a romantic relationship. We speak of loving one other person and that's where our love begins and ends. The lucky ones will speak of loving their family, but there isn't much more than that for anyone in the public mind at least.

It's simpler to love that way. We close our hearts in most of the ways that we can in order to stop our hearts from hurting more than they have to. That works on some levels, but never works on others. For those of us who don't have romantic relationships, or lack family, that doesn't take away our desire to love, be loved or our capacity to be hurt or inflict hurt on those who love us. Convention states that we love our family and usually one other person. When we violate those rules, we are seen as different, odd in many ways.

At l'Arche, the most major lesson I have learned is to not be bound by convention. It merely serves to get in the way of what I do here. And what I do is love to the depth and breadth that my heart can handle. Not necessarily in romantic relationships either. I have loved only once in a romantic way in this community. The rest of my time is spent loving those who I live with and that is so easy when we are not bound by convention.

The people I live with are not the typical family. Few have developed intellectually and many have rapidly deteriorating bodies. Some days it's harder to love when we fight or get into arguments about small things, but we still do, not because that's what convention dictates, but because it doesn't. Our hearts are not supposed to be open to everyone around us. We are only supposed to love those who can offer us something that we don't already have. When all that can be offered to us is love, we tend to be more wary of that. When we ignore convention and love anyways, we find how much more love can bind us, not apart from each other, but to each other. We are not able to leave as easily and we care so much more. We leave the bounds of convention and enter into the much more fulfilling bounds of love.