Warrior of Love

 I grew up watching Magical School Girl series. They fascinated me, these warriors of love. Gather your friends, they told us, defeat your enemies, and believe in the power of true love. Their three-fold objective might seem overly simple and too optimistic for the grey-shaded age we find ourselves in. But when you strip our lives of the complex details, isn’t the underlying core quite simple? At the end of the day, isn’t our calling to simply love?

We are created beings of love, fractals of our Creator, who is Love. The fairer sex, they call us. Our mere presence is meant to bring delight. Our actions, warmth. The smiles we bestow come with magic that dispel fear and a bad day. And the love we freely give go with a multiplying effect not unlike bread and fishes at the hands of a messiah, and return to us a hundredfold.

But our hearts are not immune to the darkness of the world. And though we may be strong, our fortresses are not impenetrable. And when the darkness breaks our hearts, the demons with the whispering voices rush in, damning us with their persistent words, dragging us down dark pits we can’t climb out of, imprisoning us in locked rooms with doors we cannot find. That prison is a place our family and friends cannot reach us, no matter how close they physically are to us. We cannot feel their embrace there. In that darkness, we cannot see them. Their voices are drowned out by the persistent whispers that tell us we are too old, and not pretty enough; that scoff at us for wishing for love; that insist we believe that we are unloved because we are unworthy.

The isolation changes us. We develop callouses to dull the persistent blows. We bind ourselves in an effort to hold the shattered pieces together. “You must be strong,” our mothers tell us. “This cannot defeat you.” And so we trudge on despite our brokenness. We close our eyes in an attempt to forget the pain. We pretend we do not hear the screaming of the child within us as the demons relentlessly take piece by piece the shining fragments of what used to be our hearts. Who needs a heart that is broken anyway?

We become strong. And while strength is a good thing in itself, we take with it the accompanying belief that no one will fight for us. Deep deep within us, there is that fear we refuse to acknowledge. We hide it because society says we should. Because our mothers tell us we need to be strong. But it is there, screaming like a child that wants to be heard. We ignore it. We pretend it’s not there. It mutates. And it mutates us, turning our siren calls into banshee screams. If anything comes close to the fears we have so long guarded, we lash out. We develop scales and a sharp tongue. People keep away. Our already starved hearts lose more love. And we harden ourselves all the more. Before we know it, the princess becomes the dragon. Before we know it, we have believed the whispers, our greatest fear, the secret we have so long held hidden: that we feel unloved.

At the back of our minds, though, we wish. Because the little girl, the fractal of Love, will always be there. You will see her in the way your grandmother dances, how her eyes light up in youthful delight. We wish that what we believe now is nothing but a lie, that someone will appear and love us even if we breathe fire. And so we wait, all the while burning everyone in our paths, and cursing the world for not providing a stronger hero. We are released from our prison. But a part of us knows that such darkness has no place in creation. And so we find ourselves wandering back to our dreary pits, to our forsaken locked rooms, wishing some warrior would someday come to slay our dragons, forgetting that it is we who are the dragons. And it is we who are our awaited warriors of love.

This is what I have become, as so many others have. But I am tired of this form. I am tired of breathing fire. I want to return to my original form: the fairer sex, the delightful presence, the fractal of Love. And so I journey now, to find my fellow dragons. Let us not merely wish that someone will love us. Let us love one another. Intentionally. Not because there’s no one else to love, but because this is our nature. We were created reflections of our Creator, who is Love. And so, before life missions or purposes on this earth, our function is really to love. It is time to fight the demons who have attacked us. It is time to fight for love.