What Is Love?

The esteemed Courtney Kidd MSW recently wrote a piece where she called into question the scope of a peron’s love. I thought that the end of our debate might be a great starting point for to further the discussion on Love itself.

Love is a complicated phenomena, and the limits of love will certainly be determined by the way in which we conceptualize it. The hardest part about understanding love is teasing apart the feeling of love from the causes that give rise to the feeling. The feeling of love is a powerful force, but we must ask ourselves if the feeling is love itself? If love is anywhere it is in the cause and not the effect. If a hug arouses the feeling of love, we would have no choice but to say that love is in the hug and not the feeling that comes about from it. If we talk about our ability to love we must distinguish between the giving and taking of love. While my colleague contends that there is a limit to love, she has not talked about the whether that limit applies to the giving or the taking.

If one is concerned with the taking of Love, one is concerned with the way one feels in a loving relationship. It is questionable if this is really the love we are speaking about. Love that is concerned with oneself does not seem to coincide with what is meant by Love.  Love is supposed to be a selfless giving phenomena. Love that is concerned with oneself is more desire, lust, or obsession than the Love of giving. It is easy to see the limit of taking love because the object of love is seen more as a commodity than an end in and of itself. I would agree with my colleague that there is a limit to the amount of Love in a taking sense.

Selfless love, giving Love, is a boundless phenomena. I conceptualize it as the point where a person transcends their limited, individual, point of view and enters into a communion with the object of love. Love becomes sacrifice, a giving of ones self and ones ground. This type of love exposes a person; it leaves them vulnerable. It’s motto is “take what you will from me, for I love you.” It is not concerned with it’s own feeling of love; it can be very painful indeed. No wonder we avoid the discussion of this type of Love. Can the sacrifice/giving love be boundless? It has been argued that the state of union is our original state, and that we spend an inordinate amount of time differentiating to the point where we forget that we are all ,always, connected as we were initially. If this is so, then the love of giving to another is a reconnection to that original state. If that is the ground by which all things exist then it is already boundless regardless of our efforts. Thus, it could be boundless. In essence it could be said that we are made of love. A familiar sentiment to many of the world religions I think.

In this sense, all this business about taking love could be an attempt to reconnect without having to expose oneself to the fear of giving love. If we are limiting love it is not for a lack of love, but for a lack of courage. Courtney said that love of a person is distinct from the love of humanity. How could that be, isn’t a person a subset of humanity? When we look at this mentality, based on the definitions above, it because clear that a person is limited in love not by their humanness, but by their ability to expand their ego beyond their own needs. In other words, they determine the love they give by the love they get. That’s a transaction, it isn’t the real Love we are seeking. I apologize if this was hard to follow, others have spoken this more clearly. In fact, one look at the Bible and we get a sense of the mess I am making of such a simple concept.

Chapter Thirteen of St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels,
but have not love,
I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

And if I have prophetic powers,
and understand all mysteries and all knowledge,
and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains,
but have not love,
I am nothing.

If I give away all I have,
and if I deliver my body to be burned,
but have not love,
I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind;
love is not jealous or boastful;
it is not arrogant or rude.

Love does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.

Love bears all things,
believes all things,
hopes all things,
endures all things.

Love never ends;
as for prophecies, they will pass away;
as for tongues, they will cease;
as for knowledge, it will pass away.

For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect;
but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.

When I was a child,
I spoke like a child,
I thought like a child,
I reasoned like a child;
when I became a man,
I gave up childish ways.

For now we see in a mirror dimly,
but then face to face.
Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully,
even as I have been fully understood.

So faith,
hope,
love
abide, these three;
but the greatest of these

is love.