Powerful book on love.
3/28/16
- What is love?
- Love: “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth… Love is as love does. Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” Since the choice must be made to nurture growth, this definition counters the more widely accepted notion that we love instinctually.
- To truly love we met learn to mix various ingredients — care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication .
- Some folks have difficulty with Peck’s definition of love because he uses the word “spiritual”. He is referring to that dimension of our core reality where mind, body, and sprit are one. An individual does not need to be a believer in a religion to embrace the idea that there is an animating principle in the self – a life force (some of us call it soul) that when nurtured enhances our capacity to be more fully self-actualized and able to engage in communion with the world around us.
- Relationship
- “Intimate relationship can provide a sanctuary from the world of façades, a sacred space where we can be ourselves, as we are… This kind of unmasking — speaking our truth, sharing our inner struggles, and revealing our raw edges – is sacred activity, which allows two souls to meet and touch more deeply.” – John Welwood
- Welwood: “A soul connection is a resonance between two people who respond to the essential beauty of each other’s individual natures, behind their façades, and who connect on a deeper level. This kind of mutual recognition provides the catalyst for a potent alchemy. It is a sacred alliance whose purpose is to help both partners discover and realize their deepest potentials. While a heart connection lets us appreciate those we love just as they are, a soul connection opens up a further dimension – seeing and loving them for who they could be, and for who we could become under their influence.”
- The essence of true love is mutual recognition – two individuals seeing each other as they really are.
- Many of us believe our difficulties will end when we find a soul mate. Love does not lead to an end to the difficulties, it provides us with the means to cope with our difficulties in ways that enhance our growth.
- Consumerism
- Because we are spiritually empty we try to fill up on consumerism. We may not have enough love but we can always shop.
- Our national spiritual hunger springs from a keen awareness of the emotional lack in our lives. It is a response to lovelessness. Going to church or temple has not satisfied this hunger, surfacing from deep within our souls. Organized religion has failed to satisfy spiritual hunger because it has accommodated secular demands, interpreting spiritual life in ways that uphold the values of a production-centered commodity culture.
- In a world without love the passion to connect can be replaced by the passion to possess.
- Fear
- “there is no fear in love”
- Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience. In our society we make much of love and say little about fear. Yet we are all terribly afraid most of the time. As a culture we are obsessed with the notion of safety. Yet we do not question why we live in rates of extreme anxiety and dread. Fear is the primary force upholding the structures of domination.
- When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear – against alienation and separation. the choice to love is a choice to connect – to find ourselves in the other.
- We cannot embrace the stranger with love for we fear the stranger. We believe the stranger is a messenger of death who wants our life. This irrational fear is an expression of madness if we think of madness as meaning we are out of touch with reality. Even though we are more likely to be hurt by someone we know than a stranger, our fear is directed toward the unknown and the unfamiliar. That fear brings with it intense paranoia and a constant obsession with safety.
- Cynicism is the greatest barrier to love. It is rooted in doubt and despair. Fear intensifies our doubt. It paralyzes. Faith and hope allow us to let fear go. Fear stands in the way of love.
- The desire to be powerful is rooted in the intensity of fear. Power gives us the illusion of having triumphed over fear, over our need for love.
- Love Ethic and Society
- A love ethic presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well. To bring a love ethic to every dimension of our lives, our society would need to embrace change.
- In their work, loving practice is not aimed at simply giving an individual greater life satisfaction; it is extolled as the primary way we end domination and oppression. This important polarization of love is often absent from today’s writing.
- Despite overwhelming pressure to conform to the culture of lovelessness, we still seek to know love.
- Fear of radical change leads many citizens of our nation to betray their minds and hearts. Yet we are all subjected to radical changes every day. We face them by moving through fear.
- Revolutionary new technologies have led us all to accept computers. Our willingness to embrace this “unknown” shows that we are all capable of confronting fears of radical change, that we can cope.
- Society’s collective fear of love must be faced if we are to lay claim to a love ethic that can inspire us and give us the courage to make necessary changes.
- Fromm: “Society must be organized in such a way that man’s social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. If it is true as i have tried to show that love is the only sane and satisfactory response to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature. Indeed, to speak of love is not ‘preaching,’ for the simple reason that it means to speak of the ultimate and real need in every human being… To have faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only exceptional-individual phenomenon, is a rational and faith based on the insight into the very nature of man.” Faith enables us to move past fear. We can collectively regain our faith in the transformative power of love by cultivating courage, the strength to stand up for what we believe in, to be acceptable both in word and deed.
- When love is present the desire to dominate and exercise power cannot rule the day. All the great social movements for freedom and justice in our society have promoted a love ethic. Concern for the collective good of our nation, city, or neighbor rooted in the values of love makes us all seek to nurture and protect that good. if all public policy was created in the spirit of love, we would not have to worry about unemployment, homelessness, schools failing to teach children, or addiction.
- Berry: “They see that no commonwealth or community of interest can be defined by greed. They know that if work is to be necessary; it out to be good; it out to be satisfying and dignifying to the people who do it; and genuinely useful and pleasing to the people for whom it is done” (wording slightly off)
- The transformative power of love is not fully embraced in our society because we often wrongly believe that torment and anguish are our “natural” condition. This assumption seems to be affirmed by the ongoing tragedy that prevails in modern society. In a world anguished by rampant destruction, fear prevails. When we love, we no longer allowed our hearts to be held captive by fear.
- Families
- the more attention focused on dysfunctional bonds, the more the message that families are all a bit messed up becomes commonplace and the greater notion becomes that this is just how families are. Like hedonistic consumption, we are encouraged to believe that the excesses of the family are normal and that it is abnormal to believe that one can have a functional, loving family.
- Capitalism and patriarchy together, as structures of domination, have worked overtime to undermine and destroy this larger unit of extended kin. Replacing the family community with a more privatized small autocratic unit helped increase alienation and make abuses of power more possible.
- Globally, enlightened, healthy parenting is best realized within the context of community and extended family networks
- Community
- Williamson: “The backlash against welfare in America today is not really a backlash against welfare abuse, so much as it is a backlash against compassion in the public sphere.”
- Peck defines community as the coming together of a group of individuals “who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to ‘rejoice together, mourn together,’ and to ‘delight in each other, and make other’s conditions out own’”
- Giving
- Sharon Salzburg: True giving is a thoroughly joyous thing to do. we experience happiness when we form the intention to give, in the actual act of giving, and in the recollection of the fact that we have given. Generosity is a celebration. When we give something to someone we feel connected to them, and our commitment to the path of peace and awareness deepens.
- Giving brings us into communion with everyone. It is one way for us to understand that there is truly enough of everything for everybody.
- Patriarchary
- To know love we must surrender our attachment to sexist thinking in whatever form it takes in our lives. That attachment will always return us to gender conflict, a way of thinking about sex roles that diminishes females and males. To practice the art of loving we have first to choose love -admit to ourselves that we want to know love and be loving even if we do not know what that means.
- Romance
- Novelist Toni Morrison identifies the idea of romantic love as one “of the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought.” its destructiveness resides in the notion that we come to love with no will and no capacity to choose. this illusion, perpetuated by so much romantic lore, stands in the way of our learning how to love. To sustain our fantasy we substitute romance for love.
- Fromm: “To love somebody is not just a strong feeling – it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. a feeling comes and it may go”
- How different things might be if, rather than saying “I think I’m in love,” we were saying “I’ve connected with someone in a way that makes me think I’m on the way to knowing love.” Or if instead of saying “I am in love” we said “I am loving” or “I will love.” our patterns around romantic love are unlikely to change if we do not change our language.
- Romantic fantasy often nurtures the belief that difficulties and down times are an indication of a lack of love rather than part of the process. In actuality, true love thrives on difficulties.
- Grief
- Love knows no shame. To be living is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending.
- Much of our cultural suspicion of intense grief is rooted in the fear that the unleashing of such passion will overtake us and keep us from life. However, this fear is usually misguided. In its deepest sense, grief is a burning of the heart, an intense heat that gives us solace and release. When we deny the full expression of our grief, it lays like a weight on our hearts, causing emotional pain and physical ailments.
- By learning to love, we learn to accept change. Without change, we cannot grow. Our will to grow in spirt and truth is how we stand before life and death, ready to choose life.
- Shame and forgiveness
- Life without communion in love with others would be less fulfilling no mater the extent of one’s self-love
- Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.
- To know compassion fully is to engage in a process of forgiveness and recognition that enables us to release all the baggage we carry that serves as a barrier to healing. Compassion opens the way for individuals to feel empathy for others without judgment. Judging others increases our alienation. When we judge we are less able to forgive. The absence of forgiveness keeps us mired in shame.
- Embedded in our shame is always a sense of being unworthy. It separates. Compassion and forgiveness reconnect us.
- Kaufman and Raphael: “Shame is the most disturbing emotion we ever experience directly about ourselves, for in the moment of shame we feel deeply divided from ourselves… Shame divides us from ourselves, just as it divides us from others.”
- General
- Cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart
- The men in my life have always been the folks who are wary of using the word “love” lightly
- My belief that God is love – that love is everything, our true destiny, sustains me.
- life is not promised
- “Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.” – Thomas Merton