What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Essay by ChicagoTunnelKid

Everything.

For me, the core of our wonderful show is not just the fairy tale modernized, but the message that love is everything. Not just romantic love, but love in its most basic form. Vincent is our mirror into understanding this, should we choose to look.

If you accept the spiritual premise that we all have within us part of the divine loving energy from our Creator (however you wish to define such) and that we are meant to learn to love others with that gift, then Vincent provides a worthy example of a being who has travelled further down that path than most of us or, certainly, me. Let me explain what I mean.

A key difference to me between our show and the fairy tale is that there is no reward of outer transformation with “normality” for Vincent to achieve. There was no curse, no magic spell that created his challenge, or, at least, none that the viewer was ever told about. Vincent is what Vincent is. The moral of the fairy tale still applies: one should look beyond the superficial to inner beauty.

It is said that you cannot truly love others until you love yourself. As a divine creation, containing that spark of loving energy, how are we to extend that outward as a gift to others if we cannot accept it first as a gift to ourselves? What keeps us from accepting that gift? One aspect that relates to this show is self-acceptance. We all have differences. But when differences become marked, in whatever aspect, distrust of ready acceptance from others gets planted, takes root, until we often create in ourselves the fear that we are unacceptable (and, by extension, unlovable). Who better might feel this than Vincent, whose differences are glaringly obvious on the outside?

Yet, how does Vincent respond to this challenge? As Father states in Song of Orpheus:

“Oh, yes, there was a time when I gorged myself on bitterness and self pity, but then I came to know someone who had every reason to curse fate, to feel punished, and yet he accepted all that life had to offer with gratitude and love.”

Such a marvelous definition of self-love that he ascribes to Vincent. Now, this does not mean that Vincent does not have doubts and fears about how others will accept him. But when he acts with gratitude and love within himself, then others respond and learn to look beyond his obvious differences to his heart beneath.

It is with gratitude for the opportunity for life and learning that we are given, that Vincent was given, that provides us the ability to trust in that loving energy within us all and to extend help to others when it is needed. This is one half of one of the founding principles of the tunnel community, Much of Vincent’s life is spent in service to others. Yes, there is gratitude for the safe haven the others in the community provide him when no other place exists for him, but Vincent goes beyond that simple gratitude and gives to others who are not within his immediate community. He sees himself as a part of a much greater whole than his immediate world.

It takes trust to help others also in the sense that the need for help is true, of real value to others, and freely accepted by them. Helping others also requires us to freely give, expecting nothing in return. Vincent, with his compassion and caring, exemplifies this again and again.

The other half of the tunnel principle is to request help when needed. This, too, requires self-love so that one may recognize when help is needed, place trust in others to be there when needed, and to hope that acceptance will not be diminished by the request. A vulnerability thus exists when someone asks for help, unsure of the response to the request and to the person asking. Strength is needed to humble oneself, to admit that one cannot always manage alone. No one learned this at an earlier age than Vincent.

That Father and the fledgling community decided to take and keep Vincent and help him survive speaks to that divine spark in each of them. Particularly, Father felt so strongly for Vincent; he recognized the vulnerable position that the baby Vincent was in, and would be in the rest of his life. Vincent learned to trust at an early age all the gifts that were given to him, and with gratitude made the most of them, in turn passing on his gifts to others.

What of romantic love? How does Vincent offer lessons for us in romantic love?

Trust is no less a part of romantic love as in basic love. Love requires us to live with an open heart, so that we may experience love and return it. Recognition of “true love” is not as easy as we may think or have been led to believe. So we often jump into, and out of, love as we try to learn better to recognize it. Unfortunately, every time we jump out of love, our hearts learn pain. Pain is a form of learning. What did we learn about love from that experience? Each hurt bears a gift for us if we are strong enough to seek it out. Instead, many create a shell around their true hearts, so that they may not experience pain, or much reduce it. But when we do this, it is only more difficult to experience true love.

So what of Vincent? Although he does show self-acceptance, he also shows vulnerability in extending himself to romantic love. He doesn’t question himself being loveable, but he questions the sacrifice that loving him would require of another. Is it fair to someone to ask her to make that sacrifice? Given his looks, we viewers can all too easily understand his hesitation to love on this basis. We also clearly see his inner beauty and recognize he is someone who is quite easily loved. So we begin to learn that lesson of looking beyond, and as we see how Vincent accepts himself, we begin to learn that lesson, as well. Surely if one so different can accept himself, so must we be able to accept all our perceived or real imperfections in ourselves. So we are hooked.

Now we can watch Vincent’s journey to love and see the possibilities for ourselves. We can appreciate better that Vincent’s and Catherine’s path takes courage and care, as any path to love does. Patience and understanding become lessons we learn (patience especially!). But through it all, we see the hope Vincent has, and always had, even if a part of him had doubts that it would happen. Love does not happen for everyone. But in my spiritual wanderings I have come to suspect it is our lesson to learn why we missed the opportunity rather than that the opportunity was not given. Vincent was learned enough to recognize the opportunity and seize it.

Love cannot be forced. This is the lesson of patience, and one that Vincent aptly demonstrates. He waits for Catherine to at first recognize his gift, and then to accept his love and what it means for her to return his love. He also demonstrates how important it is to him that she makes this decision, this commitment, freely and with her whole heart. At times, he risks losing her for being so patient (yes, I have some communication issues with this!), yet love for him must be freely given for him to believe that it can be real. Even with self-acceptance and self-love, he has too much experience with life not to know that there are challenges for anyone wishing to love him.

Does Vincent always show strong self-acceptance and self-love? No. We need look no further than to the episode Remember Love for the clearest example. Vincent questions the value of his existence, and he is guided through a vision of a world without him and what it might mean. Perhaps this shows us, we who are all too human with human frailties, that even someone with Vincent’s strengths can have self-doubt. Perhaps these moments of self-doubt, which we all have from time to time, are also gifts from our Creator meant to help us learn our own value. In these instances, we grow more certain in our self-acceptance and self-love so we are more able to open ourselves to the possibility of love. If our show offered us characters that were perfect, we would not see enough of ourselves in them to make learning from them possible.

So, what has love got to do with it? Everything.