A Royal Romance Is Announced

Daily Insight from the Story of The Little Prince

The announcement from Clarence House in London, city home of Prince Charles, of the engagement of Prince William, eldest son of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, to Ms. Kate Middleton has already captured the attention of much of the world.

It’s another of those fairytale romances, in which the handsome prince marries his glamorous princess, that touches all our hearts.

No doubt, given the traumatic history of William's mother's and father’s relationship, the happy couple have thought long and hard, working through many issues, before taking this step with the whole world watching. They have after all been together as friends and then romantic partners for eight years.

Yet the reality is that, as much as they may have faced up to already, they will have to take the same essential journey of self-development the Little Prince is taking with the love of his life, the flower he left back on his planet.

The reason an announcement of this kind touches our hearts isn’t that William and Kate are above us in terms of the quality of their romance, but that their so-very-public declaration of love for each other mirrors the longing in all our hearts to be wanted so openly and unabashedly.

As I commented a few days ago, we all desire to be desired. And what makes this the case is that in our center we know ourselves to be worthy of being desired in such a splendid way.

It doesn’t matter that we tell ourselves at times—or, in some cases, repeatedly—that we are unworthy. This feeling is simply not in alignment with what we know inwardly.

Beneath our thoughts and emotions, our heart is absolutely certain of our desirability.

This doesn’t mean that a magical love relationship of the kind the future king and queen of England are now enjoying will come our way. The fact is, it’s not of prime importance that we experience an actual romantic relationship, much as we might enjoy such.

What is important is that we awaken to our deservingness of love—based not on another loving us per se, but simply on our own value.

The value of which I’m speaking—the sense of ultimate worth—isn’t grounded in what we think about ourselves or what our emotions tell us about ourselves. It’s grounded in a much more fundamental reality: the fact that we are each inherently a manifestation of the divine Presence that is the source of and pervades the creation.

What hurts so much when someone turns us down or rejects us isn’t what transpires between us and the other person.

What hurts is what is yet to transpire within ourselves—a full awakening to our loving and wholly lovable center.

I say “full” awakening because in most of us it’s incremental. We lurch from one level of self-acceptance to another, usually painfully. Most often, in fact, by things not going the ideal way we’d like them to go.

Charles and Diana didn’t manage to traverse this path without tragedy.

Let us hope that Prince William and Kate will take the Little Prince’s journey of self-discovery successfully together, through which they can then discover the divine love that's the essence of their being . . . and share it with a world that is so desperately in need of discovering the love that's the heartbeat of creation.