Have you
ever heard Peter Gabriel’s song, “Love to Be Loved”? If you haven’t you should
check it out, it’s a great tune. He sings, quite simply, “I love to be loved.”
I do too. Who doesn’t? Who wouldn’t? I love to give love as well. Why is this?
Why does love / loving feel so natural to human beings? Is it because we are
inherently social creatures? Survival instinct? I know some who claim it’s
biologically related to neural networks and chemical transmitters. Whatever the
case may be, we’ve been discussing this idea a lot in philosophy class and we
keep coming up with different answers to the same question—what is love?
I must
admit that I have an issue with the word itself. I think part of the difficulty
of discussing “love” lay in the fact that the English word is far too broad in
scope. People will tell you that they love
ice cream, but they in no way mean the same thing when those same people are talking
about family or friends. I’ve always gravitated to Greek myself, which has
three different words for what love
in English entails. The first is philos,
what we might think of as a strong, affectionate bond between friends, or the
deep, blood bond of family. The other
relevant one is agape (pronounced
a-GAH-pay), which would be akin to altruism in the sense that we are to help
others without the expectation of anything in return. Most of the time when
“love” is mentioned in the New Testament translations, for instance, the
corresponding koine Greek word in the original text is agape. They may appear dissimilar, but in reality are inextricably
linked.
After my
yoga this morning, while doing my mindfulness practice as I lay in savasana, I
kept focused on these two aspects of love, philos
and agape. To keep my mind trained on
these ideas, I began mentally saying philos
on the inhalation, and agape on the
exhalation. I also noticed my mind began conjuring up images of what these
types of love look like in action. Very often I kept coming back to an image of
Erin when I thought about philos and
the faces of an entire classroom full of students when I thought about agape. While I tried not to think too
much in the moment as to why those images popped into my mind’s eye, I did
reflect on it after I had finished and began eating breakfast.
It makes
perfect sense as to why the word philos
would conjure up the face of my beloved. While I will always love my family
very much for all that they have done for me, the bond I share with my wife
(and I would imagine this to be the case for most marriages) will always be
slightly stronger. My parents’, brothers’, and extended family’s love all
helped mold me into who I am to a certain degree, but that love only pushed me
up to a certain point in my personal progress. Before I met Erin that growth
certainly stagnated a bit due to my increasingly cynical worldview; after
meeting my wife, however, I began to see two critical components of love—that I
was worthy of love, and that I was capable of loving in return.
Erin in some sense untied the
knot that my parents’ divorce and its residual emotional effects had created.
In my early 20s, I thought I would never get married mainly because—as I
mentioned in La Familia Es Todo—I had doubted my capacity to love, especially
that certain someone with whom I would potentially spend the rest of my life.
Meeting Erin—the beautiful, excellent woman that she is—acted like a sunrise in
my life, dissipating the clouds that had gathered on the horizon before the
dawn. Though I didn’t understand this immediately, I began to realize it more
and more as time deepened and strengthened our bond. And precisely because Erin
loved me, I wanted to be a better person in every way, whether that be as a
husband, son, brother, friend, or even teacher. Being loved by her allowed me
to realize what love is—service. There are several ways I can tell her how I love her, but an almost
limitless number of ways I can show
her. They may be little things like bringing her a cup of coffee when she wakes
each morning, or trying to do house chores before she gets home so that she can
relax upon arrival. I try my best to show her how much I love her in these
simple ways throughout the day, and these little gifts of loving service bring
me immense pleasure.
The more that I learned to
cultivate my love for Erin, the more I realized how interrelated philos and agape truly were. In some sense my marriage to Erin taught me how
to love well, how to sacrifice my own desires for those of another. And at some
point along the way, it all hit me: to love someone allows us to focus on that
person more than ourselves. This is first learned in the context of family as
we all have the responsibility of taking care of those younger than us; parents
must care for their children, older siblings must help younger, etc. Helping
others in turn alleviates many of our egocentric issues, because once the focus
is placed squarely on the other person many of our own seemingly large problems
become rather small or disappear altogether. But why stop there? Why not love
everyone as best you can? Sure it can be difficult at times, especially with
those who reject our love and or help. But what else is agape other than a test of our humanity, of our ability to love?
Throughout antiquity, cultures
constantly extolled the virtue of welcoming the other, as you never knew who
that person potentially could be (an incarnate deity, for example). In the
Torah alone, the most oft repeated commandment is to “welcome the stranger,”
which is mentioned no fewer than 30 times in those first five books of the Old
Testament. In the New Testament, Jesus tells us that loving (agape) one another should be our highest human aim. We see the same
endorsement given in all of the world’s major religions, in fact. Love is an
ancient and powerful feeling. To me, it is the human emotion from which all
others emanate. If you find that you lack love in your life, NIP, why not try
to cultivate it? Think about ways that you could give and receive more love.
The more you make love your primary motivational force, the more you’ll have it
returned to you. It may be cliché to say that we get what we give, but I think
this couldn’t be more true when it comes to love.
Love yourself and others, NIP, it’s the first step toward
true change.
- Ryan
