Today in Sacrament meeting I was pondering what it means to love, what is love and why do we love? The Bishop said in a recent conversation I had with him that we love others because of what they have done for us, that I love my mom because of what she has done for me. I do not mean to say he is wrong, I believe that that is a part of what love is but I think that it is just a surface glance of what love is. So then what is love? I thought that if I could not answer this question, at least in part, then I cannot say why I love anyone, why they love me, or why God loves everyone. I thought about this for a long time, if we only love because of what someone has done or will do for us then God wouldn’t love any of us. and we wouldn’t love those who commit crimes or who wrong us. This couldn’t be right. The purest of love transcends this definition of love. But there did seem to be a nugget of truth within this statement. After all most of the time that we love it is people we get along well with. Curiously enough I thought of the saying “misery loves company” to come up with the beginning of my definition of love. I thought that maybe this is also true of love, maybe it is it’s very essence. After all if God is love and His purpose is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man, than loves purpose is to bring more people to it. So I think that love is that light/goodness that calls to the light/goodness in others. It seeks after the potential growth of that light/goodness in others, however minuscule that light may be at the moment. As long as we can sense so much as a hope or potential or possibility of that light we will love them because the light in us reaches out to that potential. Since everyone has at least a hope of that light somewhere within the recesses of their soul this makes it possible for God who is light/goodness incarnate to love them. I think the greater the light we have the easier it is to find traces of the light in others and as long as we can find it in others we can build it so that both our light and their grows. I think then that service is the tool which we use to reach out to that light in others, to build it, strengthen it, foster its growth and encourage it. Another thought, perhaps this is why the Lord cautions us so much against judging other, because when we judge others we blind ourselves to the light that is in them and focus only on the darkness. Nothing could be so tragic because it cuts both ways, by judging you are hurting your own potential growth as much as if not more than you are hurting the other person. We would never physically blind ourselves on purpose so why do we do it so frequently spiritually?
4 comments:
What a fascinating topic my dear. I love that your focus is on love, not romantic love. I think our society/ culture's conception of romantic love has become so twisted that we draw a deep gulf between it and "love in general" and use that logic to justify unloving acts towards those we supposedly love the most. .
That being said, I like your working definition but ask you to consider a few points. If love is the light/ goodness in one person reaching out to the same in another person, is love possible in a situation where someone has justified their own actions to the point that they think they are totally in the right and another is devoid of any goodness? With your definition of love, can one still say: "I do not love him anymore because he is not the good person I thought he was and I am so hurt by his choices that I see no light in him"? This is the case in MANY young divorcees here in Provo.
And what do you say to the person who feels that there is no light or goodness in them self at all? Is it possible for them to be loved if the light in them is completely blotted out by the darkness of their self hatred and misery? There are many men and women who feel bereft of hope for themselves in today's world. Can they not find love?
Here then is my hypothesis: Love is a choice (which negates your bishop's definition, though I cannot fault him for I do not know the context under which he put forth his definition in which that simple definition may have sufficed). I repeat, love is a choice; it is an action. Love is not an amorphous noun to be found by chance and picked up like a dirty penny and shined and cherished until it tarnished with time or is found to have unseemly chinks and then is tossed aside, garners hatred, or is worst of all ignored. Love is not just an emotion controlled by hormones and chemicals in our brains. Those feelings are merely a result of the choice to love.
If you are having trouble overcoming your own pride and Blindness to the light in another individual, service (as you so wisely hit the nail in the head) is THE way to learn how to love another. Being served by someone, as your bishop suggested, may indeed increase our good feelings towards another but it is not eternal or sustained love. To keep that kind of love going one must continually be served but this can most definitely be done without love.
Instead one must choose to see value in an individual even when they do nothing for you or seem to have no light in them. God loves us in our most tarnished and chinked state when we are covered in dirt and grime and are incapable of gleaming and reflecting the light we once did. After all, we are still a penny and a penny has value. Our value only increases as we gather others to us in love. We may not have light. We may just be an ugly handful of grimy pennies. But we have value. We have worth. And we are always capable of love.
I love you Traci!
Beautiful thoughts dear heart. I particularly liked the thoughts on service and seeing the light in others as well as ourselves. I would say that in a person who has lost all of that light, we can still hope for return and can try to share love with them by shining our own lights on them and extending a loving hand. When they can not see their own light we can show them that we see it, by loving them, and by trying to help them build love for others.
Bri, I appreciate your thoughts as well, and I concur. Love is a choice. A choice we have to remake every day, in every action of our lives. It's how we build up the power of our light and it's how we build up the light and potential for light in others.
Bri-
In answer to your proposed situation I would say that I do not know that it is possible for a person to believe that they are completely in the right so much so that they believe that there can be no light/right/goodness in the other party. I do believe it is possible for someone to argue/trick themselves into thinking that this might be true but I believe that there remains a part of their heart, however quiet that part might be that tells them that there are two sides to every coin, that there is never simply one right side that life is a record of different shades of gray. This does not mean that I would argue that there is no right or wrong I do not mean to propose such a thing I simply believe that human beings are imperfect beings and do not reside in such truths. Their lives are riddled with a mesh of the two; right and wrong. I would argue that no one person is completely in the right because motivations for human actions are so complicated. In any case I would say that this is partially what I meant when I said that judgment can be so dangerous. Believing that you are completely in the right would be to judge and condemn another and their motivations/beliefs. Because they are hurt, they judge the other person to be “not good” and blind themselves to the light in the other person. This is not to say that love is no longer possible but rather as you say they are choosing to blind themselves, they are choosing not to love. So I guess what I mean to say is that I would agree that love is a choice. It is a choice that is very easy and at the same time extremely difficult to make. I would say that we choose the way in which we see others and we choose to allow ourselves to judge them or not, or to choose whether we will love them or not. My question to you would be Why do you believe we chose to love? I suppose in essence this is what I am trying to determine, why do we choose to love, why do we choose to see that light or the value in another individual? Why does God choose to love us?
maybe we choose to love because we like being loved (or need to be loved). Maybe we choose to love because the alternative (a life of alientation and of seeing only the darker side of man - assuming that the nature of man is evil) is so repugnant to us, that we know the better option is to love. :)
or if we're better than that, maybe we choose to love because love is good, we have the light of Christ in us and that recognizes what is good and what we knew in the life before this: God is love and the pattern of heaven is one of love. ;)
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