Last time I chose a topic it was death. Now life's other painful inevitability - no, not taxes - love. According to all the spiritual traditions I know, Love has a central, if not the central place. But what kind of love? Surely not the intense, passing fever of romantic passion, even less it's pale cousin, infatuation. It seems an irony that something as notoriously fickle, treacherous and ephemeral as romantic love should share the same word as that which in the great religious traditions is supposed to be eternal, even synonymous with God. The Greeks did not confound such utterly disparate phenomena. They had several words for love: Eros, for passionate love, of which sexual love is one variety; Philia, for friendship and loyalty; Storge, for natural affection, especially within the family; and finally Agape, for deeper or true love, including selfless love, the spiritual love which we are supposed to strive for or live by in most (all?) religions. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love.
But all these forms of love are related (I would argue), and one could make an argument that even the most shallow infatuation is an inferior or immature form of this one Love, that in infatuation we love the image of something we see through the window of the temporary object of our desire. For a moment we see Beauty, Passion and Transcendence incarnate in the form of some chick. Romantic love seems to be the way divine love reaches those of us who aren't saints. That is how it generally breaks through and wounds us.
Because love is the only way we get wounded. I challenge anyone to find a counter-example. Only physical pain seems to defy the rule that all pain comes from love, or in fact the failure and the loss of love. (Of course the formula requires a broad definition of love, including the self-love of egotism). Love hurts us either because we lose the object of love, or the object of love does not love us back, or loves us in some imperfect way. Initially when I was writing this I was thinking of love as an outgoing thing, the act of loving. But love is intrinsically two-way, at least the love that seems to matter most. We need the object of our love to love us back, sometimes to love us back in a very exact way. That is why we seek and seek for a love we never quite seem to find: because we love the idea of being loved in a certain very precise way, and any imperfection in that being-loved-ness is intolerable to us. S/he is not The One (how religious!).
Some psychologists would argue that is all about parental love - the quirks of our adult tastes and choices are expressions of the way we were loved or the way we failed to be loved by our parents, mainly of course our mother. But where does this passion for maternal love come from? How/why do these infantile wounds carry such intense stings? Like we come into the world naked and helpless and ready to have these invisible knives plunged into us, wounds from which we will continue to bleed our whole lives - at least if you buy that line of psychological theory. On a philosphophical/speculative note, if the infant's love and need for love is some reflection of divine Love, then does God also fail us in the same way mother inevitably does? Is Love itself flawed? (Again presupposing one is prepared to take a Platonic view of love - I mean the eternal forms idea, not platonic with a small 'p').
OK, this has gotten deep. I'll stop there. One other observation that is interesting: there seems something faintly embarrassing about the subject! Why is that? I have an idea, but am interested to hear what others think.
But all these forms of love are related (I would argue), and one could make an argument that even the most shallow infatuation is an inferior or immature form of this one Love, that in infatuation we love the image of something we see through the window of the temporary object of our desire. For a moment we see Beauty, Passion and Transcendence incarnate in the form of some chick. Romantic love seems to be the way divine love reaches those of us who aren't saints. That is how it generally breaks through and wounds us.
Because love is the only way we get wounded. I challenge anyone to find a counter-example. Only physical pain seems to defy the rule that all pain comes from love, or in fact the failure and the loss of love. (Of course the formula requires a broad definition of love, including the self-love of egotism). Love hurts us either because we lose the object of love, or the object of love does not love us back, or loves us in some imperfect way. Initially when I was writing this I was thinking of love as an outgoing thing, the act of loving. But love is intrinsically two-way, at least the love that seems to matter most. We need the object of our love to love us back, sometimes to love us back in a very exact way. That is why we seek and seek for a love we never quite seem to find: because we love the idea of being loved in a certain very precise way, and any imperfection in that being-loved-ness is intolerable to us. S/he is not The One (how religious!).
Some psychologists would argue that is all about parental love - the quirks of our adult tastes and choices are expressions of the way we were loved or the way we failed to be loved by our parents, mainly of course our mother. But where does this passion for maternal love come from? How/why do these infantile wounds carry such intense stings? Like we come into the world naked and helpless and ready to have these invisible knives plunged into us, wounds from which we will continue to bleed our whole lives - at least if you buy that line of psychological theory. On a philosphophical/speculative note, if the infant's love and need for love is some reflection of divine Love, then does God also fail us in the same way mother inevitably does? Is Love itself flawed? (Again presupposing one is prepared to take a Platonic view of love - I mean the eternal forms idea, not platonic with a small 'p').
OK, this has gotten deep. I'll stop there. One other observation that is interesting: there seems something faintly embarrassing about the subject! Why is that? I have an idea, but am interested to hear what others think.
No comments:
Post a Comment