Love
Dictionary: A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness.
And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
St Paul
Perfect love casts out all fear
St John
Responsibility without love makes us inconsiderate
Power without love makes us cruel
Belief without love makes us fanatics
Intelligence without love makes us dishonest.
Lao Tzu
Upon hearing of the deaths of his two greatest disciples, the Buddha said,
It’s as the sun and the moon have left the sky.
I believe that the heart of the Universe is love: not narcissism, not vanity, not egotism, but Love. Why do I believe this? Because I believe that God the Creator is love. While God is One, God is also Three (Triune), or else what we would have at the heart of the Universe would be narcissism!
Communal love emanates from the source of all creation.
Love does make the world go around. Romantic love, familial love, love of creating, love of creation, love of working, love of living, love of others, love for God.
So what is it that causes so many of us to choose to live without love, or at least to live with so little of it, anyway? We play around the edges, we flirt with it, and we think about it. We want to give and receive love … but when love comes around it’s off to the shadows.
Too costly
Too dangerous
Too demanding
Too painful
Too, too, too
My studies and experiences of the human condition is that people typically live out of fear, rather than love. Look at what drives and informs so many of our decisions: fear of rejection, fear of exposure, fear of not fitting in, fear of loneliness, fear of losing, fear of doing without, fear of being wrong, fear of doing wrong, fear of being laughed at, fear, fear, fear. Here we are, created by and for love, choosing to live in fear … or at least choosing to keep our distance from an all-out-love for God, love for others, love of life. What’s up with that?
Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strange with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold;
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.
Oscar Wilde, Ballad of Reading Jail
“Some kill their love when they are young.”
A couple of years ago a man I hadn’t heard from in 30 years sent me an email. I didn’t remember his name when I first saw it, but I remembered the counseling session as he described it. He had the Love of His Life who felt the same toward him. The fly in the ointment was Dad: he didn’t like the girl. At the time the young man was around 25 and dead set on attaining his dad’s approval. Admirable, to a point, but, as I pointed out, he was going past the point of honorable intentions into the land of juvenile fear. It’s a long painful story that ended with the young lady moving on with her life—without him.
The subject of his email? “I am 55 years old and still basing my decisions on fear of a father who has been dead for 10 years.” Sad. But at least he is waking up.
What is love? 'Tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What's to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies not plenty …
Shakespeare, Sonnet 91
Love is now. Love lives in the moment, is experienced in the moment. The “plenty” that love can bring is lost by delay: delaying to decide, to act, to embrace, to move, to experience love’s fullness rather than shying away, unsure and fearful, running back to the familiar, the safe, the known.
This is getting too long for a single post! Let me think some more about this and will finish the thought here later in the week.
Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2010
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