The What and the Why of Love

Why Love?

“What is love for?”

That was the first question. It was a Sunday afternoon at the Recovery Church meeting. As is typical, we had strayed from our original topic. A phrase in the reading, a chance comment, had struck one or the other of us, and the question was asked: “What is love for?”

After a pause, one of us said, “To make life tolerable.”

That reminded me of what the fantasy writer, Lloyd Alexander wrote about art. “We have always needed good art to sustain us, to strengthen us, even to console us for being born human.” [1] Love does this, too.

Yet love does more than sustain and console. Without it, we die, if not in body, then in spirit and soul. “It’s like babies who fail to thrive when their physical needs are met,” said another member of our group, “but they have no love or tenderness.”

We need love to survive.

Love and Caring

On a simple level, this is because to survive we need to be taken care of. Love creates the bonds that make us want to nurture and protect one another.

Unless we are honest with ourselves about who we are, though, and unless we can see others clearly, any bonds we develop will be fragile, falling apart when tested. After stating that we need “good art,” Alexander identified why. It teaches us about ourselves, encourages us to see life through another’s eyes, and helps us make sense of the world.

Love does this, as well. Because it can tolerate imperfections, love allows us to reveal our true selves. We learn about our strengths and foibles, we come to accept and forgive. In this way, we understand life, experience grace, and honor the sacred. We grow into compassion.

We grow into compassion through story, as well. In order to love, we must be able to see through another’s eyes and accept our humanity in its fullness. Stories are a great way to encourage this. Whether in books or in movies, at family dinners or at parties, or in songs that tell the secrets of our soul, we need tales to open our hearts and grow our spirits. We need stories to learn to love.

Ameliorating Pain

But what if no one told us stories, at least not ones of kindness, compassion, and honesty? What if our life story was so full of abandonment and rigid rules that fantasy and folk lore were not allowed? Perhaps we never experienced the consolation of good art because our parents believed that stories are vicious lies.

The more we reject tall tales and fantasy and frivolous art, the more cold and cutting and cruel we will be. It takes a gentle spirit to embrace the truth revealed through the “lies” of fiction. When all we read and watch are the hard-edged recitations of fact – including the false facts that these days masquerade as truth – then our hearts become hard-edged and our capacity to forgive shrivels up. Then we may find that what we call love is actually punishment.

“I did it because I love her,” a parent might say. “It’s for her own good.”

Maybe.

When my son was two, he fell and sliced his eyelid. At the emergency room, the doctor strapped him into a contraption that held his head motionless before he stitched up the cut. Furious, my son screamed and raged. But the potential consequences of moving his head while the doctor worked were so much worse than the discomfort he experienced, that, as parents, we had no choice but to stand by and watch. Sometimes all we can do is witness, hold, and comfort as much as possible. Love may ameliorate the pain, but it doesn’t take it away.

False Love

False love, though, neither takes away nor lessens pain.

I spoke the other day with a woman who struggled to make sense of her mother’s declining health, of life and death, and of God’s will. Perhaps she was trying to avoid the fear of what would happen to her mother, trying to wrest some measure of control from her life, but she spoke less about the certainty of death and more about her fear of our country. There was, she said, so much “false love” being bandied about.

“Love isn’t ‘live and let live,’” she explained. “There’s right and wrong, values to live by. Love doesn’t mean you can do just anything.”

Of course, that’s true. But this woman wasn’t talking about kindness and generosity, forgiveness and acceptance. She was referring to the biblical values one should uphold. Commandments, duties, that sort of thing. Is love a strict adherence to letter and law? If we insist on rigid definitions of right and wrong, we end up with bitterness, judgment, and anger. This is not love.

So What Is Love?

So what is love?

In a previous column, I wrote, “Ask the right questions, let go of judgments, and learn to love.” One of our members pointed to this quote and wondered what I meant by love.

“Yes,” someone else said. “What kind of love are we talking about? Love for God? From God? For or from other people? For pets, things?”

We may say things like, “I love ice cream,” or “I love your hair color.”

This isn’t love, of course. It’s craving, enjoyment, appreciation. Love is something that sustains and strengthens us, that consoles us. Though ice cream may feel consoling at times, it’s not love.

True love makes it okay to be human, even when we are so often in pain. Love frees us from shame and bitterness, fills us with a sense of awe and wonder, and arouses the passion we need to protect our children or save the world. Though it may feel warm and fuzzy, true love is deeper than this. It melts judgment from our hearts. It requires obedience and service; willingness and patience. Because love brings us together, it helps us survive.

Which brings us back to the why.

Again, Why Love?

One reason for love is that it heals.

Now and then, when I’m visiting with a patient, she will talk nonstop, barely taking breath. At first, she might complain about someone who did her wrong or some system that’s oppressing her. As she does so, I honor her feelings, which is not the same as taking sides in her battle or affirming the rightness of her cause. Maybe I point out her sadness or anger or confusion. There’s no right or wrong in what I say. Just noticing.

After a while, as the patient feels held by an acceptance for perhaps the first time, she begins to hear her own words. She starts to find a way out of her stuckness, to take responsibility for herself, to become more whole. Most of the time, I don’t need to ask a question or make a suggestion. I just have to listen.

The listening is the love.

It’s like with good art. When we look at a painting or listen to a poem, our innermost being is mirrored back to us. So it is with the patient. The truths that lie within us are revealed. When we see ourselves without judgment, we are healed.

Not that it’s always this simple. There are those wonderful moments when a person is ready, when he’s done his work and and is just waiting for someone to come along and show him the next step. When the step is revealed, and he takes it, life feels sacred and beautiful. In reality, this happens only a small percentage of the time, yet those few holy interactions make the rest worthwhile.

Love Encourages Slow Change

Five years ago, my son was incarcerated yet again. I had so hoped he was done with getting in trouble, but it was not so. It was not an easy year. While working as a chaplain, I was taking care of my elderly mother, and then my husband got cancer, and the treatment that cured his illness also made him sick. Most Saturdays, I drove the hour to Salem, waited on line, chatted with other family members, got processed so I could go in. For an hour or two, my son and I would play cards, chat, stare at the walls. I would listen to his stories of bravado, unfairness, and anger, or of kindness and friendship. Here and there, glimpses of wisdom showed themselves in what he said. No matter how strained the afternoon, how withdrawn or distracted my son seemed, there was always laughter and affection. There was always love.

I visited because, most of the time, I enjoyed his company. Besides, I wanted to be a role model, to remind him of decency, sanctity, morality. Not in so many words, nor in lectures or Socratic questioning, but in my bearing, in my own stories, in the way I treated him and those around us. Mostly, though, I wanted him to know that, no matter what he had done, I loved him.

I loved him with the fierceness of a mother who has learned we cannot always protect our children from the unfairness of the world, nor from their own mistakes. We must given them room to fly and room to fall, as this same child did when he was a toddler and cut his eyelid.

True Love, Not False

This listening, this consistency, this acceptance, and this hope are all part of true love. False love, however, takes on the battles of another without challenging the ways she scapegoats or blames; it protects the beloved from facing the consequences of what he’s done. True love listens, affirms the pain, but does not need to take it away. True love invites the change that heals.

As the daughter told me, “live and let live” is not love. It’s abandonment. Such an attitude is like a shrug of the shoulders, a dismissal of the person in front of us. We don’t need to see them. We don’t need to engage. Instead, we tell ourselves that as long as they aren’t hurting us, it doesn’t matter what they do, so we don’t bother paying attention.

By sharing stories and opening ourselves to new truths, we might change our hearts and theirs, but we dare not risk that. We say we’re being accepting and nonjudgmental. By refusing to take sides, though, we abandon those who are wounded by the ones we “let live.” Love does not mean “anything goes.”

The woman was right. This is a false love.

One of the members of our circle said, “When we say we love others, we’re really saying we love ourselves, or we love the other person because of what that person does or can do for us.”

That kind of love is weak. It does not challenge or defend. It is not true.

Transforming Love

True love sees beneath the bravado of our ego, our mistakes, and our pettiness. It calls to that spirit of life within each of us, bidding it sputter awake and rise. Such love never gives up hope. It helps bring home even the most wayward son.

The important word here is “helps.” There are no guarantees. After all, we are free to reject even the purest love. It would not be love if it were coerced.

Today my son lives nearby. He is in college and doing well. Life is not as hard as it once was for either of us, but love is still needed.

That’s because love holds relationships together, affirms strengths, and ignores slights when it can. At the same time, it calls out the cruelty it sees, forgive the failures, and celebrates the beauty in the other’s soul. Such love invites us forward and onward. Because of it we blossom and become. We heal. Then we can honor the world with our gifts.

The Strength of Love

For thirty years, Father Gregory Boyle has used his gifts to serve, encourage, and love gang members in Los Angeles. He struggled to convince law enforcement and public leaders that these young people matter and that we owe them compassion and opportunities. When he was younger, he was angry. He shook his fist at the unfairness of the world. Eventually, though, he “learned that shaking one’s fist at something doesn’t change it. Only love gets fists to open.”[2]

As Buddha and Martin Luther King, Jr. taught us, hate is not vanquished by hate. Only love triumphs over hatred, a love that stands strong through storms and refuses to yield to bullying. A mother’s love does this. So does the love that encourages the violent and depraved to open their hearts and feel the embrace of forgiveness and acceptance. The problem is, we can’t force others to accept love. We can only invite them. Yet when we’ve walled off every sensitive and caring impulse within us, love hurts. Why would we take in something that will shatter our frozen hearts?

Because if we are to change, we must take in that love, no matter how much it pains us. By letting ourselves be loved, by experiencing the gift and the challenge, we learn to love others. In this way, bit by bit, true love can heal the world.

In faith and fondness,

Barbara

Credits

1. Alexander, Lloyd, “Opening Statement,” Innocence and Experience, eds. Barbara Harrison and Gregory Maguire, New York: Lothrop, Lee, & Shepard, 1987, 195-197, 197.
2. Boyle, Gregory, “Part 1 – Introduction,” Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship, New York: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2017, 12:59-13:05.

Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash

Copyright © 2019 Barbara E. Stevens All Rights Reserved