WHAT IS LOVE?
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“Maybe we don’t know what love is. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit to find out that this is true.”
I’m supposed to tell you what love is. But I can’t. Not really, anyway.
The trouble is that the only kind of love that really matters, the self-giving, never-ending, all-outpouring love, unconstrained by conditions, reason or even the laws of nature is, by definition, infinite. To my eternal annoyance, I’m distinctly finite, and by definition, the finite can never describe the infinite. So really, I’m setting myself up to fail here, but I’m going to try anyway. Trying to describe love is a little like trying to describe the wind: you can see what the wind does to the branches of the trees, you can feel the wind on your face or fingers, you can hear the wind as it moves through the world, but you can’t see the wind itself. I’ve seen this kind of love, Love, move and change the world around me. I’ve felt this Love incomprehensibly melt away my conceptions of self, and leave me changed, forever. I’ve been inexplicably compelled by this Love into irrational actions, choices more difficult than I would have ever been able to make were it not for the Love that made those choices inevitable. My whole life has been taken over by my search for and the command of this Love. But I can’t tell you what Love is, not really, not fully. That’s impossible.
Some call this kind of love agape, (pronounced ah-GAH-pay) which is an ancient Greek word used to describe this outsized kind of love. Agape is bigger than the love we have for our family, our friends, our lovers. Those loves are big and beautiful, too. They are a part of who we are as humans, and they are breathtaking gifts to us. And yet, agape is more than all of them combined, more than what we are capable of loving on our own. The strength and power of agape love does not diminish other sorts of love, rather, agape undergirds all of them. When our love for others is at its best and deepest, our love begins to look like divine love, God’s Love, agape Love. Some of the earliest authors in the church went as far to say that “God is agape.” (2) That’s how big agape is. That’s the level of enormity we’re talking about when we’re trying to talk about Love. That’s too big to talk about.
But what I can tell you about Love is a little bit about how it works in the world, what this Love does, how it functions. (How it usually functions. Love is unruly and wild in the best way.) Every now and then I’ll bring in some conversation partners. These conversation partners are those the church calls mystics, individuals who are ardently in love with God, who seek God with their whole lives, and whose writings are filled with the wisdom they've gleaned through their experiences of Love. Love will always be a mystery, but the mystics are those who live into the mystery, and they have much to teach us.
The first mystery of love is that the best way to know about Love is by loving. Perhaps the act of loving is the only way we can begin to understand Love. Here Love is a little like dancing. We can read books about the history of dance. We can watch videos of ballroom dancers. We can look at the numbered footprints and arrows painted on the floor of the dance studio, and imagine what it would feel like. But until we actually start dancing, we don’t really know the heady and wonderful swirl of dancing. In the same way, we learn about Love by loving.
In England in the late fourteenth century, an unknown person sat down and wrote a work called The Cloud of Unknowing. It’s sort of a treatise-prayer manual combo. The gist of the work can be summed up in this quote: “Though we cannot know him, we can love him. By love he may be touched and embraced, never by thought.” (3) We can read about God. We can listen to sermons about God. We can think about who God is, we can read prayer manuals that tell us how to meditate. But ultimately, like dancing, that’s all just information, a cloud of unknowing, as it were. Until we begin to love God, the God who is Love will always elude our understanding. Only by loving do we begin to understand Love. Teresa of Avila, the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic (also community organizer, spiritual autobiographer, non-boring prayer manual writer, super funny, the type of person you’d love to hang out with) writes, “Remember: if you want to make progress on the path and ascend to the places you have longed for, the important thing is not to think much but to love much, and so to do whatever best awakens you to love.” (4)
There’s really no better advice for those who are seeking to discover what Love is. Don’t think too hard about it. Instead, do the thing. Make time to be. Pray. (5) Desire Love, tell God about it. Be honest. Listen closely to your soul and see what leads you closer to Love. As we awaken to Love, we find that our capacity to Love and to be Loved grows. Not overnight, of course, but a sort of unfolding has begun. And that’s the next thing we need to know about Love. Love will never leave you where you started. To Love and be Loved is to start a process of transformation.
Love’s transforming power is always beautiful, but it’s not pretty. It’s always good, but it will hurt. A lot. Some things within us must die to make room for more Love. It might help to think about roses for a moment. Not two dozen long-stemmed red roses, which is usually what we think about when we think about roses and love. Those will be trashed a few weeks after Valentine’s Day, so never mind those. Let’s think about a rosebush instead, a living source of beauty and grace all summer long. The thing about rosebushes, though, is that they need to be radically (6) pruned to produce a truly stunning abundant showing of beauty. And we humans must be pruned, too. Love acts as our gardening shears.
With each clip of the shears, we cut off the dead and non-producing branches, making way for the new shoots. We start to change the way we act. Clip. Ouch. The things that seemed all-consuming and important don’t seem to matter anymore. Clip. Ouch. We begin to care more deeply for others, which makes us vulnerable. Clip. Ouch. We might also begin to realize our true worth, as one who is Loved, as one who was created to be Loved, as one who was created to Love. This begins to change our unhealthy relationships, wreaking chaos in our lives. Clip, clip, clip. Ouch, ouch, OUCH. When we’re done pruning, it feels like there might not be anything left. Certainly not any roses, just a mangled, thorn-covered stump. But each dead branch Love has clipped away has made space in our lives for Love to grow. And removing the weight feels good. We can begin to figure out what it means to flourish, to Love ourselves, to Love others.
Bernard of Clairvaux was onto this when he wrote in his Treatise on Love, “The more surely you know yourself to be loved, the easier you will find it to love in return” (7) (Bernard revitalized dying monasteries, conducted state diplomacy across Europe, and was an all-around genius in twelfth-century France. Another good one to have at parties, despite his proclivity for treatising.) After our pruning, a virtuous cycle begins: when we find it easier to Love in return, we also find it easier to know that we ourselves are Loved, which then makes it even easier to Love. The transformation from stump to stunner doesn’t happen quickly, but once it begins, when nurtured, Love grows stronger and stronger. We put forth shoots, and leaves, then buds, and then finally, roses. Rose, after rose, after rose. Eventually, we may scarcely recognize ourselves. We’re somehow more ourselves than we have ever been, certainly more beautiful, and yet less concerned with the question of who we are. Life becomes filled with roses: purpose, grace, Love. Having been pruned down to the barest essentials of ourselves, knowing now that nothing can separate us from this Love, we are finally free to fully and unabashedly be ourselves. We simply bloom, and we fill the garden with fragrance and beauty, a gift to all who walk by.
Which brings us to another paradox, another mystery of Love. The more we know we are Loved, and the more we are Loved, the more we are willing to give up the very self we so longed to be. Evelyn Underhill (an English spiritual director and pop-mystic of sorts during the early twentieth century, not as good at parties as Teresa or Bernard, but with very British dry wit if you like that sort of thing) writes this in her work The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day: “The spiritual life is not lived upon the heavenly hearth-rug, within safe distance from the Fire of Love. It demands, indeed, very often things so hard that seen from the hearth-rug they seem to us superhuman: immensely generous compassion, forbearance, forgiveness, gentleness, radiant purity, self-forgetting zeal. It means a complete conquest of life’s perennial tendency to lag behind the best possible; willing acceptance of hardship and pain.” (8) Sounds fun, huh? But actually, when Love has had Love’s way with us, we find that very self-giving, compassionate, outpouring Love is the very same thing that gives us abundant life, energy, purpose, and meaning. We’ve been changed into people who Love, into people whose “hard and always heroic choices” are made because they are “inevitable.” (9)
In knowing our own Love, we have become those who Love, and we make Loving choices, no matter how hard, simply because that is who we have become. If the what of Love is impossible to describe, the why of Love is not. We come to know Love, we are transformed by Love, so that we too may participate in the difficult joy of Love. With Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, we discover the wonders of God’s creation. With Oscar Romero we fight for the poor. With Desmond Tutu, we end apartheid. With Frances Perkins, we create social safety nets for workers and children. With Fred Rogers, we revolutionize children’s television. With Bernard and Teresa and Evelyn we gaze upon Love in wonder. With Love, we create art and joy and community and hope and wonder. With Love, we find we can do impossible things. Those who the church call Saints are none other than those who have figured out that they are Loved and then they just go for it, living wildly, extravagantly, recklessly in Love. It’s the most beautiful thing in the world, to see Love in action, lived in a life. Then that Love goes out and changes the world, because Love simply must give of itself. That’s just Love.
Perhaps the lives of saints and mystics seems too impossible, too large, too wild for everyday living. But there’s one other funny little mystery about Love that gives me great hope for those on the journey like you and me, something I’ve found to be true and encouraging in my own life. (I’m not a towering spiritual genius, but like Teresa and Bernard, I am great at parties.) One of the most beautiful and lovely things I’ve learned about Love is that Love is both the means, and the end. What I mean is this: If our aim is Love, the way we get there is by Loving. So if we take even one tiny step in the direction of Love, we have already Loved. We have reached the goal of Love, just by simply trying. By Loving we have partaken in Love, even if that Love is imperfect, or small, or seemingly insignificant. There is no failing in Love! Love reveals itself through Love, Love transforms through Love, Love compels us through Love. Love is the beginning, the means, and the end, the dance, the rose, and the life fully lived. So don’t be afraid. Give it a try. The One Who Loves You has made you to Love.
Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, trans. Mirabai Starr (New York: Riverhead Books, 2003), 91.
You can find this in 1 John 4:18. That means that this is the first letter from John, in the fourth chapter, the eighteenth verse. It’s near the back of the Bible, or you can use a search engine to find it.
“The Cloud of Unknowing,” in The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, ed. Bernard McGinn. (New York: The Modern Library, 2006), 267. Note: This author uses gendered language for God. But that doesn’t mean you have to if it’s not helpful!
Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, trans. Mirabai Starr (New York: Riverhead Books, 2003), 91.
More on that in another essay!
Literally radically -- the root word of radical is root. Think of radishes.
Bernard of Clairvaux, “On Loving God,” in Bernard of Clairvaux: Selected Works, trans. G.R. Evans. (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 179.
Evelyn Underhill, “The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day,” in Light from Light: An Anthology of Christian Mysticism, ed. Louise Dupre and James A. Wiseman. (New York: Paulist Press, 2001), 435.
Evelyn Underhill, “The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day,” in Light from Light: An Anthology of Christian Mysticism, ed. Louise Dupre and James A. Wiseman. (New York: Paulist Press, 2001), 439.
