Love First
Love First
What we need is a revolution in our values, a revolution that turns our attention more reverently and responsibly to the interdependent, relational character of life. What we need is a spiritual and practical revolution that embodies love for neighbor and for the world through sustaining structures of care and responsibility….
Loving our neighbor implicates us in loving the whole network of life. Science has given us photographs of the earth from space. We can see we are one blue globe, wreathed with clouds. We know the crust of the earth floats on a core of fire. Even the rocks are part of a complex flow of elements that fold down into that molten core and rise again. We dwell in our cities and towns on a living, breathing planet molded by transforming fire, flowing waters, the exhalations of trees, and the inbreathing of animals. This interconnectedness of all things calls for wisdom and reverence. We cannot trample this landscape of life as ignorant fools and expect to be safe. We cannot turn from our bonds and obligations for and with one another and expect everyone to be okay. We cannot love after the fact and expect love to be able to save life. Maybe in the end love will save us all, but it has a lot better chance at the beginning.
We need to love from the start—not as an emergency strategy when everything has gone wrong.
by Rebecca Parker, president of Starr King School for the Ministry (Unitarian Universalist), from her book Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now. Edited by Robert Harvies and published by Skinner House in 2006, this book is available from the UUA bookstore (800-215-9076) or through the CLF Library (617-948-6150).
From Your Minister
From Your Minister
by Meg Riley Senior Minister, Church Of The Larger Fellowship
In a book I read years ago, called The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis describes the ancient Greeks’ understanding of love.
I think that there are probably dozens of kinds of love—I have been wishing for a new word just to describe how I feel about my iPhone, or the particular way baby animals makes me feel—but the four from the Greeks certainly are a good place to start to flesh out that big old English word LOVE.
The four that Lewis’ book describes are agape, which is love between God and people; eros, which is the bond between lovers; filia, which is literally translated as brotherly love, as in Philadelphia; and storge. Storge is the love of what is comfortable and comforting.
It’s a good book, and I recommend it. I have read it several times, and even led adult education classes about it, for it provides rich opportunity to talk about love. Just to spend time thinking about when what is comfortable and comforting becomes love, and what this means for different people, is fascinating. I personally think storge is highly underrated—I have never seen it as the motive in a murder mystery, for instance.
I also like to use these four words to poke around at ideas in my own mind such as, if we aspire to Stand on the Side of Love, are we edging up next to agape or to filia? For UUs for whom justice-making is the primary spiritual practice, what is the difference?
Many years ago, at the end of one adult education class exploring these concepts, a man said, his voice shaking with vulnerability, “I mean, how much love does everybody experience? I have good friends, my wife and I are still kind and interested in each other after 26 years—is this it? Is this what everyone else thinks is good enough?” He was genuinely not sure.
Are you? Is there enough love in your life? I think many of us, whether we are alone and rarely interact with others, or are surrounded by people and animals and tasks that we enjoy, might wonder that sometimes.
For me, the path to knowing that there is enough love in my life has led to spiritual practice focused on a kind of love which is not laid out in C.S. Lewis’ book. Only recently did I wonder if the Greeks also have a word for self-love.
Luckily, I have a handy-dandy friend, a CLF member who is an ex-pat in Greece. I called her to ask this. She replied that she wasn’t sure, but would ask someone who is a birthright Greek. Then she emailed me this:
Just had an interesting conversation with C. about self-love and she said the correct word is probably auto-ektimisi. I think the closest translation is self-esteem, but C. thinks this sounds too superficial to the meaning in Greek. She says it’s a very deep, very proactive concept—something not everyone can reach but which gives us (through accepting our own mistakes) the energy for life.
My friend continued:
I could be wrong, but both “self-esteem” and “taking care of myself” in English sound like therapy-speak. C. and I often talk about how Greek culture is essentially Eastern, with lots of value placed on self-knowledge. So ideas like auto-ektimisi run deep, whereas they might not in English/ Anglo-Saxon approaches.
I don’t know about you, but I think the concept that the only people who achieve real depth of self-love are the ones who accept their own mistakes is an intriguing one. As I struggle with daily imperfections so striking I don’t even need my fourteen year old to point them out—trusty Greek chorus though teenaged children be in this regard—I like thinking that all my mistakes give me extra spawning ground for something good, namely extra opportunity to practice auto-ektimisi.
Years ago, I had the privilege of sitting in a ten day meditation retreat with Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg. Salzberg’s definition of meditation was the kindness we show to ourselves when our mind wanders, yet again. Such systematic re-teaching of kindness and interest in our mistakes, in our imperfections, is deep practice indeed.
On that retreat, the fact that I had the attention span of a gnat on my zafu cushion could be seen as a strength, not a liability—I could practice this kindness and interest over and over and over (if I could remember to do it).
I think my Greek friend is right, that “taking care of myself” in English can mean anything from narcissism to shallowness. I am much more interested in swimming in the deep waters of self-love. And I suspect that this is where we can each know, or not know, that there is enough love in our lives. I suspect that this is where loneliness or a sense of “not enough love” most resides—in lack of auto-ektimisi. I suspect that more marriages fail because of the lack of auto-ektimisi in one or both partners than from anything between the two. There is no love we can offer to or receive from others, finally, which we are unable to give or receive to ourselves.
So, I imagine auto-ektimisi as the hub of the wheel that is all kinds of love. May your own wheels keep rolling. May you spend your days discovering and naming new varieties of love. And may your life be rich in this most valuable currency of all.
REsources for Living
REsources For Living
by Lynn Ungar, Minister For Lifespan Learning, Church Of The Larger Fellowship
What with Valentine’s Day being in February, we decided that this issue of Quest should be on the theme of love. It’s a topic with plenty of room for things to say. For instance, back in 1986 Whitney Houston released a song called “The Greatest Love” that spent three weeks at the top of the charts. Which means that anyone in the age group this column is designed for probably has never even heard the song, but hang in there with me—or check it out on YouTube. It’s a good song, but one that has always left me pondering the topic of love.
The chorus of this song ends with:
The greatest love of all
Is easy to achieve.
Learning to love yourself
It is the greatest love of all.
That sounds good and encouraging, but is it really true? For starters, I think there are a lot of people who would say that loving yourself really isn’t easy at all. Honestly, who among us hasn’t spent time bashing ourselves over the head with our stupid mistakes, our physical imperfections, the ways we don’t live up to our own expectations or the expectations of others? If learning to love yourself were really that easy, would Whitney have even bothered to sing about it?
But I have a bigger question that comes along with the last two lines: is learning to love yourself really the greatest love of all? It seems to me that when we think of people who are truly great, people like Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., what was inspiring about them was not just that they loved themselves, but that they managed to promote love for all people. They stood up to hatred with love, they preached love, they practiced love and they used love to bring more justice into the world. I don’t think just loving yourself is enough to transform the world like that.
On the other hand, in a world that wanted to tell both men that they were worth less than white people, both Gandhi and King knew in their very centers that this prejudice was a lie—that they had just as much inherent worth and dignity as anyone else. They did love themselves, and they were willing to do the work to change the world so that they could be treated with respect for that worth and dignity.
Maybe the greatest love isn’t one or the other, loving yourself or loving those around you—maybe it’s putting the two kinds of love together. Of course, the most famous statement of this idea comes from Jesus, who said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” It’s all there in five words. The greatest love of all isn’t just for yourself. If you just love yourself then you might decide that you deserve to have everything you want, ignoring the costs to other people and the planet. We’ve seen what happens when the heads of companies like BP and Enron just love themselves, and it isn’t pretty.
But the greatest love also isn’t based in loving everyone else because they’re so much better and more deserving than you. If you just love other people then you are likely to end up as an exhausted doormat (Do doormats get exhausted?), someone who runs around trying to make other people happy without any core sense of who you are and what you need.
Recently I’ve stumbled on a new favorite phrase, one I’d like to have on a button or a bumper sticker. You might want to use it too. Here’s my new favorite: “You’re unique, just like everybody else.” I think the world would be better off if people would just remind each other of this great truth on a regular basis. You are unique. There is no one quite like you in the world. You deserve to be treasured—your particular gifts and abilities and experiences have never been seen before and will never be seen again. But the world will also be better off if you remember that everyone around you is just as special, just as precious, just as deserving of love and respect as you are. You’re unique, just like everybody else.
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The greatest love isn’t loving yourself. The greatest love also isn’t loving everyone but yourself. The greatest love is living from the certainty that every person, every animal and plant has its own inherent worth and dignity, just like you. Some people would describe this as God being inside of all beings. We love God through the way we treat everyone and everything we meet. We decide how to treat others based on the understanding that how we treat them is how we are treating God. Or, if the God idea doesn’t work for you, you can go with the idea shared by religions around the globe: treat others as you would like to be treated. Not just because life works better that way, although it certainly does. Treat others as you would like to be treated because loving yourself and everyone else is the greatest form of love, and love is the heart of everything good.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Love,
Lynn
Love Dogs
Love Dogs
by Rumi
One night a man was crying,
“Allah, Allah!”
His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
“So! I have heard you
calling out, but have you ever
gotten any response?”
The man had no answer for that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage,
“Why did you stop praising?”
“Because I've never heard anything back.”
“This longing you express
is the return message.”
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs no one knows the names of.
Give your life to be one of them.
Apple Eyes
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I suppose, given the state of the economy and the global mood of anxiety, that it isn’t too surprising that recent essays about the New Year lack the themes of big possibilities and hope that used to be standard fare for the season. Read more →
Born Again… and Again… and Again
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The Christmas dinner had barely settled in my stomach. The taste of cut-out cookies was still sweet on my lips. The New Year’s champagne still bubbled on my tongue when I started to see them—the signs on the windows at the gym around the corner from my house. “Get in shape for the New Year,” they read. Read more →
The Heat Wave
I’m responding to an invitation by Rev. Riley to describe my corner of CLF (as stated in your lovely article in the July/August issue of Quest). Something happened this past week which describes my corner pretty well, and can illustrate for Chaplain Pat why I appreciate her work, so I wanted to tell you about it.
From Your Minister
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Recently I ran into someone who said, “You changed my life! After you told me that you liked pedicures, I had one myself, and I liked it so much I began having them weekly. They’re now my favorite luxurious treat for myself. But if you hadn’t said you liked them, I never would have started.” Read more →
REsources for Living
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I think I deserve to be congratulated. For the first time ever, I have actually kept a New Year’s resolution. Yep, from the first of January 2010 right through to January 2011 I have consistently and diligently followed through with my resolution. Read more →
