Tag: love

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Martin Luther King on love

Envy, jealousy, a lack of self-confidence, a feeling of insecurity, and a haunting sense of inferiority are all rooted in fear. … Is there a cure for these annoying fears that pervert our personal lives? Yes, a deep and abiding commitment to the way of love. ‘Perfect love casteth out fear.’

… hate divides the personality, and love in an amazing and inexorable way unites it.

We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. … But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. … Love is the most durable power in the world.

Martin Luther King Jr, Strength to Love

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Of love, compassion and the unexpected angel of mercy

Without passion there’s no compassion. In the same way there has to be eros in the mixture if there is to be agape as well.

Thus open this morning’s ‘Lent Daily Reflections’ by the World Community for Christian Meditation. Both those sentences ring entirely true to me. It is through suffering that we learn to be compassionate; and true love is always marked by agape and eros.

The reflections then refer to Luke 22:41-44:

[Jesus] withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed. He said, ‘Father, if it’s your will, take this cup of suffering away from me. However, not my will but your will must be done.’ Then a heavenly angel appeared to him and strengthened him. He was in anguish and prayed even more earnestly. His sweat became like drops of blood falling on the ground.

I have quoted this passage from the fairly new Common English Bible. Anyway, the reflections conclude:

This is no fairy tale. For any mature person it resonates with our own experience. Aloneness, anguish, fear, physical symptoms, the unexpected angel of mercy. But at the heart of it is the love [Jesus] felt holding him, which empowered him to love those he did not even, at that instant, consciously know.

There are two insights in this that resonate deeply with me: that we are empowered to love by being held in/by love ourselves, and that it is particularly in those experiences of intense suffering that we meet the unexpected angel of mercy.

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Love life fiercely

Love for beauty; care for the material life that gives pleasure and joy; appreciation for the numinous world, revealed by the Spirit in life; and embrace of the eros that empowers human beings as social creatures to seek others – these are spiritual powers that deliver salvation.

We reenter this world as sacred space when we love life fiercely, and, in the name of love, protect the goodness of our intricate web of life in all its manifold forms. We recommit ourselves to this world as holy ground when we remember the fullness of life that is possible through our communities, our life-affirming rituals, and our love of beauty, of truth, of goodness.

Rita Nakashima Brock, ‘Paradise and Desire: Deconstructing the Eros of Suffering’, in F. LeRon Shults and Jan-Olav Henriksen (eds), Saving Desire: The Seduction of Christian Theology

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Love deeply

Do not hesitate to love and to love deeply. You might be afraid of the pain that deep love can cause. When those you love deeply reject you, leave you, or die, your heart will be broken. But that should not hold you back from loving deeply. The pain that comes from deep love makes your love ever more fruitful. … Every time you experience the pain of rejection, absence, or death, you are faced with a choice. You can become bitter and decide not to love again, or you can stand straight in your pain and let the soil on which you stand become richer and more able to give life to new seeds.

Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey through Anguish to Freedom

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Why I read the Song of Songs I

So why do I read the Song of Songs, or more to the point, why am I spending so much time with it? Having raised the question a little while ago, I am conscious that I still owe an answer. Or maybe several.

Here’s my first, which is probably self-evident. Then again, it doesn’t seem to be, at least not to most people. As a Christian, one might have thought that the book being part of the Bible would be reason enough to read it. Sadly, that is not, or perhaps it’s best to say no longer, the case. Having been one of the most read, preached and commented upon books of the Bible in medieval times, the Song of Songs features hardly at all in contemporary Christianity and spirituality.

It is easily demonstrated that the decline of the Song’s popularity began precisely at the point when it was increasingly recognised that it celebrates human love and sexuality rather than being concerned primarily, or even exclusively, with spiritual matters (of course, this is not to deny that there is a deeply spiritual side to our sexuality).

So does the Song of Song’s celebration of human love and sexuality (and the body!) lessen its relevance and importance? I would have thought not. Quite the opposite. But that is a different matter that I shall have to come back to some other time.

For the time being, my first answer is quite simply that I read the Song of Songs because it’s in the Bible.

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Rumi on love

Look inside and find where a person
loves from. That’s the reality,
not what they say.

… and remember, the way
you make love is the way God will be with you.

If you want
to be more alive, love
is the truest health.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.

Rumi, The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing