Defining Love

I was on the ladder painting the house when a nearby religious radio station overpowered NPR and I heard someone railing against homosexuals.

I was amazed at how much hatred I was hearing. The evangelist said God defined homosexuality as a crime and further that God requires death for homosexuality. I started down the ladder but before I could retune the radio this same person said that he loved homosexuals. He mused, “How can I love these criminals who should be put to death? I love them because Jesus teaches that we should love our neighbors and even our enemies.”

“How sad,” I thought. “That person doesn’t understand love.” But then I thought, what is my understanding of love? I turned off the radio and climbed back up the ladder to think that over.

It certainly didn’t seem loving to condemn someone to death or call him a sinner saying he would go to hell. That seemed more like hate than love yet he saw no contradiction in what he was saying. As a Christian he knew that he was supposed to love everyone even his enemies. Did he understand the notion of loving everyone in some way I didn’t? It seemed that he was just using the word without giving it any meaning. Try as I might I couldn’t come up with any nature of love that would allow such harsh judgment. However, labeling what he was saying as hateful sure wasn’t getting me any closer to my understanding of love.

When I climbed off the ladder I went straight to my dictionary but no definition was particularly helpful even in describing my love for my wife, Barbara. Closest was “strong passionate affection” but my feeling for Barbara is much more than that. When I tell her I love her I mean I will do my best to never make her unhappy. The definitions for the verb “love” all started with “to have”. Shouldn’t love be an active verb? If so, what action? The dictionary tells me that to run I should move my legs rapidly. I’m not expecting to find a graphic definition like that for love but maybe there should be some reference to the body. We are fond of thinking of love as coming from the heart. Have we placed the seat of love in the heart because we don’t think we have any control over loving? Love and the heart don’t really have any connection. To love our neighbors or our enemies has got to be a conscious action. If someone sticks a gun in my ribs and says give me your money, I can’t see ever getting to some higher plane of consciousness in which I will be flooded with a feeling of love for this guy. It will take some work, some thinking to get over my gut feeling.

Nose still in the dictionary I look for definitions for two words similar to love (venerate and like) and the opposite of love (hate). These definitions all begin with “to regard” and the definition of to regard is “to think of with a particular feeling”.

Hate, venerate and like are things we do in our mind. While feelings are involved, still, we have some control.

Affection figures heavily in the definitions for love. Back to the dictionary. “Affection n 1. a settled good will, love, or zealous attachment: as the affection of a parent for his child. Good will could describe my desire to never make Barbara unhappy but it still doesn’t go far enough. Not only is it important that I not make her unhappy I wish happiness for her at all times from all angles. The same for my children. Ditto for my friends. In fact, I don’t wish anyone ill will. But the definition is not just “good will” but “settled good will”. Apparently, by this definition, there has to be some history involved with affection.

I could also say I have a “zealous attachment” to my immediate family but I wouldn’t say I am zealously attached to my friends. Are there different kinds of love? Did I love my father the same as I loved my mother? Do I love my son the same as I love my wife? Do I love my daughter the same as I love my son? As I think about these real relationships I realize that my feelings for each are different. Feelings! Do I feel the same about my father as I feel about my mother? My son as my wife? My daughter as my son? No. My feelings are different. My emotional response when I think of each is different.

What of the love for my neighbor or my enemies as expressed in The Bible. I don’t see anything in the definitions of love or affection that addresses love for everybody. Then it occurred to me that perhaps there was just one love, or rather a core love, a trunk from which the various forms of love branch.

On the ladder the next day I didn’t seem to be any closer to understanding love and then it occurred to me that what bothered me about the radio preacher was his judgment of homosexuals. I thought of my yoga teacher, a vegetarian which she carries to a judgment of all animals that eat other animals. She also preaches universal love. I once asked her if she loved hawks.

“Yes, but I don’t love how they eat. I wish they would learn to eat nuts and berries.”

“If you love them, shouldn’t you accept their nature, their being, as it is?”

Acceptance. Yeah. Can I imagine love without acceptance? No. Acceptance must be in the definition of love I’m looking for.

At some point in every session my yoga instructor tells the class to breathe in good thoughts, among them unconditional love. Of course love should be unconditional but, hold on a minute, is there even such a thing as conditional love? What might be a condition of love? I love you as long as you don’t kill someone. What kind of a friend would that be? If you kill someone, you will need my love more. Would I abandon a friend in the time of greatest need? Even traditional wedding vows deny conditional love—“to have and to hold, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health … until death do us part.”

Love must be unconditional acceptance. That covers the problem I had with the radio evangelist. If he accepted people’s sexual orientation or preference, he wouldn’t be judging them. It is something that I can actually do if I put my mind to it.

I’m still working on this core definition for the verb to love. I’m sure unconditional acceptance is necessary. A warm feeling also seems like a good addition at least for those with whom I come in contact—maybe not the guy with the gun. I’m also thinking that respect would be a good addition. These are all things that I can actually strive to do.

Getting away from my judgment that the radio evangelist doesn’t understand love is difficult. I want to rationalize and say that I accept him but I judge his belief. I certainly don’t hate him. I have no illusion that I could change him. I have thought about him, given him a family, found respect for his commitment to his beliefs accepted that he believes he loves his neighbors and his enemies and through this empathy exercise I have developed something of a warm feeling toward him. He must be good at his job to have a radio show. He probably brings hope and solace to many. In a way he is my enemy because of the hatred he preaches. Loving my enemies is tough.

All this thinking about love has helped me get over road rage. When someone pulls out in front of me now I’m just thankful I was able to slow down without an accident. It has done wonders for my blood pressure; much better than the days when I would ride up on the back of the offending driver and turn on my lights. Once, with the whole family in the car, I turned on the windshield wipers by mistake in my road-rage. “You sure showed him, Dad.” That has become a family joke.

I may never learn to love my enemies but I certainly enjoy driving more now that I have accepted that bad driving practices do not make bad people and I am making progress with my feelings for the evangelist.

How to love everybody

There are two adults in their thirties who are good citizens of the world. I have given them my love for their whole lives. I don’t think my parents ever doubted that I loved them. I have been in a loving relationship with my wife for over forty years. I have studied, thought about and written extensively about love. However, none of that makes me an expert if there is such a thing. I’m going to tell you what I have learned that is contributing considerably to what I call my profound happiness in the possibility that it may resonate with you.
Self-love is the foundation for any love. Acceptance and respect are the tools for building the foundation.
I spent a depressing hour with a paraplegic a number of years ago. I was not depressed because he had lost the use of his arms and legs but because he was so unhappy. Wouldn’t I be unhappy if I were confined to a wheelchair? I doubt I would be thrilled about my condition. If I had done it to myself, as this man had driving drunk twenty years earlier, I might be pissed at myself for my stupidity but I wouldn’t be taking it out on others. I would start with acceptance. I don’t delude myself into thinking it would be easy but the sooner I got over being angry at myself, angry at the world, hating myself and the world, the sooner I would be on the road to finding happiness.
Thinking of life as a game helps me accept my life as it is. In this case a card game works best—any card game except poker. In poker you can throw in any hand you don’t want to play but in most card games from Go Fish to Bridge you have to play the cards you are dealt. Playing a poor hand well can be very satisfying.
Paraplegia is an extreme but none of us is perfect. In our teens we tend to focus on our physical imperfections. Rather than focusing on the zits we need to step back from the mirror. I am who I am and a lot of who I am is pretty good. Others may not see it but I know I’m special. I guess that was my attitude when I was in my late teens. I remember thinking that girls who didn’t want to date me were missing something. The wonderful irony here is that I don’t even know if they didn’t want to date me because I never asked. I desperately wanted to be in the company of girls but I was too shy to initiate a relationship.
In my twenties I had a number of relationships with women; several could have been good partners in marriage. I didn’t realize why I rejected commitment then and what changed when, at 31 I asked a woman to marry me and a year after that fell apart I proposed to my wife of 40 years.
The journey from shy to beginning a stable marriage was largely unconscious. Feedback from relationships at play and at work probably built my self-confidence and self-respect, which, in turn, helped me accept myself. My “zits” disappeared as I move farther from the mirror and saw myself reflected in the impression I made on others.
My conscious effort to find happiness began a year after marriage when I found myself to be unhappy. As it was my happiness that was in question I thought the best place to look was within. I investigated what made me happy and what made me unhappy and began doing more of the former and less of the latter. I was not looking for frivolous pleasures but things I had done that I could look back on with pleasure. I found that the unhappinesses were things that prayed on my conscience or things I took to be unfair.
I won’t go into what I found rummaging around in my mind. The point is that a good place to look for happiness and love is within. One of the things to look for is anything about yourself that you find unacceptable and fix it. There are two ways to get rid of unacceptable parts of yourself—change if it is possible or accept.
For example if you masturbate and you don’t think you should, either stop masturbating or accept that it is part of who you are and that it is fine. I know some say masturbation is a sin but there are very few people between the ages of 7 and 90 who don’t masturbate. Smoking, taking alcohol or other drugs, biting your nails may be things you feel you should change to improve your self-respect. Work on them however you can. There are only two universal rules: 1) Do no harm to another living now or in the future 2) sex only between consenting adults. I say that only for someone who may have a conscience that would allow either of these.

How to love 2

Not how to love another or your dog or vegetables or your country--just how to love. Not how to love your spouse or how to love your mother or how to love your father or how to love your son or daughter. My daughter didn’t wait to teach her son how to jump until he was old enough to broad jump or high jump. She taught him what fun it was to jump in puddles and to jump into her arms. Knowing what jumping is he will be ready for someone to teach him how to jump over a bar or to jump a distance or to jump out of an airplane.
It seems to me we ought to learn how to love without the encumbrance of all the different kinds of love. Sure my grandson is learning how to love his parents and grandparents. That is easy because he is being loved but what is that love that he is receiving? It is a feeling, to be sure. Basking in the radiant love of his parents and grandparents feels good, so good he returns it in kind with a smile, a giggle, a wriggle and even a full body spasm. How wonderful that feeling is. That must be part of love, a warm, happy feeling.
How can we have a warm, happy feeling about someone we hardly know? If we are to believe that we should love our enemies, what is that love? Can we have positive feelings about Osama bin Laden? Maybe love for our enemies doesn’t include a warm feeling, but what then?