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ecently Joseph was out of town and so I took advantage of this to indulge in the BBC’s 4-hour 2009 version of Jane Austen’s Emma. It was delightful. One of my favorite things about the story is how you get to witness two people waking up to the fact that they are head over heels in love with each other and they don’t know when or how it happened. All they know is that it is so and now they have a whole new perspective on life.

I liked the way Romola Garai as Emma and Jonny Lee Miller as George Knightley had the time and luxury to let us experience these two as close family friends who had become like kin slowly recognize their longing for each other.

Between his brother and her sister marrying and producing a lot of children and the effect their age difference had on their friendship, their blossoming romantic love taking them by surprise and finally being acted on was scrumptious.

As I pondered the gift of falling in love with someone who returns the love, it occurred to me that falling in love like this is pure grace. It can’t be forced, seduced, chased after, or pursued. You can be aggressive, attempting to conquer your love interest, and have some modicum of success (depending on your definition of success)…

But the drop everything, butterflies-filling-the-belly, heady experience of falling in love with someone who falls in love with you is pure grace. And when it happens, your whole perspective on life changes – in an instant!

That’s the piece that can rub parents and friends a little raw. Suddenly you have passion and loyalty for a person who is brand new in your life (unless he or she has been a friend for years) and may be a stranger to your friends and family. Even if your new love is an old friend and everyone knows this person, being in love and in a relationship changes and challenges all the other relationships. But you don’t really care because your perspective on your life changed in an instant of awareness.

photograph by Sarah Elizabeth Malinak

It dawned on me that this is what enlightenment must be like. A moment of grace when one’s perspective simply shifts and you experience all of life from the perspective of God, eternity, Unity, no-self, or however you describe the Truth of Being.

All the gurus, enlightened, and awakening teachers ultimately say that, in the end, austerities, meditation practices, and winnowing of the personality do not make enlightenment occur. When it happens, it is all grace. And when it happens, one lives from a new perspective unlike any perspective found here in the illusion…Like falling in love.