It’s All About Love - Part Two

In spite of the trivializing influence of romantic and sentimental views of love in Western culture, love is the strongest force in the universe. Only love can soften a hard heart. Only love can renew trust after it has been shattered. Only love can inspire acts of genuine self-sacrifice. Only love can free us from the tyrannizing effects of fear.

Love speaks to the depths of our soul, where we yearn for release from our isolation and long for the belonging. Love awakens our hunger for relationship and connection.

The deepest ache of the soul is the spiritual longing for belonging. No one was created for isolation. “Nothing in creation is ever totally at home in itself,” says John O’Donohue. “No thing is ultimately at one with itself.”1

We seek escape from our isolation through possessions, power, and accomplishment. But none of these are ever capable of satisfying the restlessness of the human heart. To be human is to have been designed for connection, intimacy, and interdependence. Love is the glue that makes these things possible.

Love demands hospitality to the inevitable tensions or conflicts that are part of any intimate relationship. The more intimate the relationship, the more love presses these demands. If we dare to face rather than seek to escape them, these tensions give us a chance to wake up in the dimensions of life where we avoid naked, direct contact with reality. Intentionally embracing the challenges that are always present in a relationship also gives us an opportunity to connect more deeply, not just with another person, but with life itself.

Love invites us to allow our energy to radiate outward, never remaining self-protecting or congealed. It invites us to move from defensiveness to openness, to stay present and open to each other when otherwise we would choose to either attack or run and hide. Love alone is capable of completing our being as it joins us with others at our very depths and center. 

Love is our true destiny. Thomas Merton writes, “We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.”2 The meaning of our life is revealed to us most clearly in love, with those we love. We will never be fully real until we lose our egocentric selves in love – either with another human, with life, or with the Transcendent One. But this love requires that we “climb out of the cradle where everything is getting and grow up to the maturity of giving – without concern for getting anything in return.”3 

Love is life reduced to its essence. This means that it involves an intensification of life that reflects its potential fullness and wholeness. It is for love that we came into the world – both to experience this communion and self-transcendence and then to pass it on to others. We do not become fully human until we give ourselves away to others in love – not just sexual love but in mutual care, creativity, and spiritual concern.

Love becomes transformational when we relinquish the need to control both our lives and the lives of others. Ilia Delio writes, “It creates personality in us not by adding anything special but by chiseling away the stuff we smother out our lives with, as if we could become something other than ourselves.”4 

Love really is the strongest, most creative, generative and regenerative force in the universe.

What the World Needs Now

Given the potency of love for healing, growth and transformation, what could possibly be more important for the world than humans learning to give and receive love? But the love we need to learn to give and receive is not the soft sentimental kind associated with Valentine's Day but the hard kind associated with loving those who will not or cannot return our love. 

Love has become a transaction rather than a gift. But the only love that can ever be transformational is love that is given away, not exchanged. The only love that can ever truly make us and others whole is the love we give and receive as a surprise – a surprise even to ourselves. The only love that can ever truly make us and others whole is love that is given with abandon and recklessness, not in measured small doses.

Rumi knew this truth. Listen to his words5:

Love is recklessness, not reason.
Reason seeks a profit,
Love comes on strong, consuming herself,
Unabashed.

Yet in the midst of suffering,
Love proceeds like a millstone,
Hard-surfaced and straight-forward.

Having died to self-interest,
She risks everything and asks for nothing.
Love gambles away every gift God bestows.

But notice that I have been speaking of giving and receiving love – not, receiving and then giving. Love has not only become a commodity of transaction, it has become something we have come to believe we must store up and only pass on after our own supplies are at a high enough level to warrant the risk of depletion. We think that the love we have to give to others is the excess of what we have received and hoarded. But this misses the whole point of love.  

Love is like a stream. It is meant to flow. Once you block the flow it begins to go stagnant. Love that is hoarded is no longer life-enhancing. In fact, it quickly becomes toxic. Wounds don’t heal by soaking in love but by passing love on. 

The world’s great spiritual teachers have always challenged us to do exactly this. Jesus taught by word and example to love one’s enemies, not just one’s friends. In fact, he was clear that transactional love – that is given so it will be given back – is not love at all.6 Love that is not freely given is not love at all. The Dalai Lama’s teaching on compassion gives the same message. If you want to be happy, look for every opportunity you can find to be compassionate to those whose paths cross yours.7 

If you want to make the world a better place for yourself and others, keep love flowing through you without obstruction.

Notes:

1. John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on our Yearning to Belong (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), p. xxii.
2.  Thomas Merton, Love and Living (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002), 27.
3.  Thomas Merton, Love and Living, 34.
4.  Ilia Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2013), 186.
5.  Rumi, The Mathnawi of Jalalud'din Rumi, Vol. VI (London: Biddles, 2001).
6.  Luke 14: 1 – 14.
7.  http://www.dalailama.com/messages/compassion

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2021 © Dr. David G. Benner

• How do I respond to the temptation to store up love until I can pass it on out of surplus rather than share it with recklessness?

• How can love flow through me in a less obstructed way?

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For more on love and what it means to live heartfully, see Dr. Benner’s book, Surrender to Love, Expanded Edition (2015).

Surrender to Love

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