Love and Leadership
Most of the conversations people have about love are really about possession, about the fear of abandonment or change, the fear of what they think love and its lack says about them: about anything but love, and almost always about themselves. They demonstrate an approach to love which is indistinguishable from conquering, from appetite or a kind of violent acquisition. Must have. Must own. Must consume.
The lover is alone in the center of those relationships. Anyone they try to have a relationship with might as well be a cardboard cutout. Their humanity, their consciousness, their soul is completely irrelevant. The lover has themselves and the projections they believe make them whole, the emptiness and addiction they believe is love.
A choice must be made, by priests and spiritual workers. We so often hold the center of relationships and we must choose what sort of lover we will be. The nature of the role draws people to us and puts us in a position of authority. The people drawn to us come from many backgrounds, with the emptiness and addictions they understand to be loving, and they offer us what they have. More importantly, they offer us what they can recognize as love.
And in turn, we end up embodying what they recognize as a part of our work. A lover who is angry and demanding, a possessive lover, a lover who is distant or even cruel: whatever they most deeply recognize. Whatever touches them most fundamentally.
As a priest or spiritual worker, if we are the center, we will take what they have to give us. The energy is incredibly potent and confusing, and the people we serve will tell us what they’re giving us is love and something we are entitled to. You can start to believe them, to confuse the role you play with your own understanding of love. You can be ‘drunk’ on the energy you are given, or think of the high from it as something that is a compensation for the sheer volume of painful bullshit the people we serve tend to cause us.
There is no compensation. That is one of the many snares ego places in front of us.
I like to think of possession as, among other things, a reminder that we might hold the center, but we’re holding it for something else. A mark of maturity for priest or spiritual workers is our willingness to hold that center to let other things come through as needed. It is also in our ability to wear many faces.
The lwa, as I understand them, are the many faces of divine love. A face becomes a face, the spirit coming in droplets and rivers.
Where a priest or spiritual worker understands love, they will let go.
