The Story of the Vulnerable Knees

You will weep each time an idol falls. HEAVEN cannot be found where it is not. Each idol that you worship when God calls will never answer in His place.
(A Course in Miracles)

He was eighteen years older than her. She met him first at her firm's annual fundraiser. A professor of literature with amazing wit and force. She was literally melting in his presence when she saw him work the room. They made passionate love that night. She is hardly the girl who sleeps with men on her first date, but in him she literally saw her unborn children that evening. Then a couple of months into her relationship something strange happened. She saw him drinking his coffee early in the morning. He was nude under his bathrobe, and when she saw his knees, he suddenly looked so old and fragile. For some weird reason she felt repelled seeing him like that.

When I first read the "bathrobe story" I felt sad. I am also getting older, what if someone perceives me that way one day? But then it occurred to me that this story is all about the ego. Yes, it must hurt to be that intellectual who is first idolized and then falls from grace one day as he seems over the hill. But then, he also knew that night that he was conquering a woman who literally fell in love with his superior intellectual powers and maybe not with his true essence. Life is about steadily falling out of love with the things that once were so meaningful to us - intellectual and physical powers, sex and fame, wealth and prestige, and what have you. But then, it is not that we are dying inside. Instead, we fall deeper in love with the people we care for, and start recognizing GOD's many messengers that we were once too busy to perceive.

Idols be gone! What truly matters is to experience love; everything else is a mere distraction.