10/10/2016

Mins,

“The other or only side of love”

The week begins again with all its weights. I was thinking of this other side of love you spoke about yesterday. The one no one talks about. The one that is probably more vital because love is defined by the tools used to cope with it; patience, kindness, long-suffering and forgiveness. There is that odd part of falling in love where you are most concerned with making the other person ‘better’. By ‘better’ we mostly mean more agreeable and by more agreeable we really mean more fit for the purpose of loving us in the way we believe we deserve to be loved.

And isn’t “deserve” the word? We mostly see love as the drink of water at the end of the life-bending walk through the desert of loneliness. Once we find the person we think we can love what we are mostly thinking is “love me. Love me.” And every fight with a lover is really: “why are you not loving me?” I know many times this is justified. I also think many times it is not. For the call of love is lost in the wail about self.

I do not mean that love has no demands and one person is simply a receptacle for the other person’s quirks and flaws. I mean that love in this universe is arranged in the arms of God’s wisdom. That wisdom tells us that we cannot be filled with water unless we share the well. It speaks to the idea of giving so we might get something more than we imagined. It locates the idea of self in the discipline of effacement and selflessness. It answers the question: “what if I am used?” with “then, love more”. I know this sounds dangerous. Love more does not mean give in to evil. It does not mean indulge the selfishness of others. It means follow the wisdom of God. It means obey the higher things.

Let me get a little practical. Sometimes a loving act could be simply to walk away from someone. There might be damage there that needs addressing outside the comfort of the crutch we are being and calling it love. To be sure we do not heal anyone or save any soul. We either help or harm. When we are not leading them to the light we are hurting them. How do we know the difference? Love needs context. There is not one pill for all illnesses. The context of all love is God. The guide of love is the Holy Spirit. We are speaking of Divine Love diffused into the human experience. We are talking of how to show eternal love. The context is having a relationship with God. The deeper that is, the deeper our ability to show love will be.