I am endlessly fascinated by the subject of love. It warms something in me to see the love of a father or mother for their child; the love of a man and wife; the love of grandparents for their offspring…and all the other variations of love that open and bind the hearts of human beings.
When we open our hearts to allow something or someone in, it changes us. I have observed that love changes with people as they mature and grow older. It can deepen and mature along with them. It can communicate what no words could ever say. It is no wonder that more songs and poems have been written about love than any other subject.
I’ve heard love defined in many ways: an emotional need for someone; an outgoing concern for others etc. I’ve decided that the best working definition I can come up with is: Love is building a sense of connection between us and someone else, it is the expanding of our sense of ourselves to include others. When we love things or plants and animals, we come to include them in our sense of ourselves. We identify with them as a part of what makes us whole.
When two people marry they ‘become one’. We get a glimpse of love in the act of sexual union. For a brief moment we can drop the barriers that separate us from another and we can experience the joy of at-one-ment. In the union of two spirits, when one experiences joy or pain, the other feels it too. There is no longer a sense of you or me, it becomes ‘we’…ideally. When children come from such a union the sense of ‘I’ or ‘we’ is expanded further to include them. If ones sense of self is not expanded in marriage and having children then something is amiss. One has not learned the lessons from these experiences.
When we love someone their needs and desires become important to us, ideally as important as our own. We have expanded our sense of our-self to include them. I have come to believe that expanding our sense of ourselves is one of our primary purposes for existing here on earth, if not THE primary purpose. Whatever one believes, one has only to look around to see that life is about growth. Acorns push up sidewalks to become oak trees. Love is growth. Love can be painful because it breaks through the barriers we erect for ourselves to separate us from others.
We can expand our sense of ourselves to include our clubs, our sporting teams, our villages and towns, our states, our countries and even our planet and beyond. When one of the things we identify with experiences something good or bad we can experience it too, depending on how much we identify with it. Most of these forms of love are only glimpses of the real thing. The real sense of being ‘one’ with another is beyond the power of words to describe.
Most religions teach some form of love, however imperfect. Faith invites us to become ‘at-one’ with God. That is the ultimate love. He feels the connection with us because we came from Him. It is we who have broken the connection and need to learn to re-connect. On some level we all know this and feel the need for that ultimate connection. We rebel against it at the same time because we want to keep the barriers that separate us. That’s the conundrum of our existence.
Just think of the admonitions in the scriptures:
Love God with all your heart, all your mind and all your strength and
Love your neighbor as you love yourself...
Love one another as Christ loves you...
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you...
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love...
God is love...
It's never been said better.
Love comes from God through us, but we have to make the way clear for it to come out of us. We have to reach out to express it; to grow and to connect with each other. That's why we're here...
