Finding a place for love

I’ve been embarrassed to ask about love in this movement. Embarrassed, I suppose, to suggest that I want to be capacious enough to extend love to every person that I encounter, no matter what. This kind of thinking, this posture, this way of moving through the world, has often been criticized by movement makers with a different ethic. Disparaged as weak or pandering: a way of prostrating before people who would sooner step on your neck than extend anything that resembles love in return.

But as I find myself at the intersection of race and spirituality, I cannot help but wonder what role love will play. What role I want it to play.

It occurred to me, recently, that I hold a lot of resistance to the idea of talking about love in the movement for liberation. Physically. My body tenses up at the idea of including love in our conversations; as if I’m afraid of being found out, as too soft to walk toward freedom with everyone else. So I’ve been afraid to allow love a seat at the table. To give love a place in the room. Or a moment at the podium. I have been embarrassed to think that love could have any place at all. How could it, when people were dying? When people have been chained? When breath is being stolen? When lives are being pillaged? How could we possibly even begin to think about love? But I think that if I am going to talk about encountering race differently, and from the seat of my spirit, maybe love should get to be part of the conversation. Or maybe, at the very least, I can be curious about what love has to offer me here.

I used to think about love all the time. In that hopeless romantic kind of way. That poetic, weak-in-the-knees kind of way. I don’t know what made me that way. Maybe it was Catholicism. Because God was love. And God’s book was a book of poetry. Psalms. Songs. Corinthians. Those lines - to my devout, adolescent mind - were as swoon worthy as any words I had ever encountered.

Merriam-Webster describes love as:

Strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties.

And:

Affection based on sexual desire: affection and tenderness felt by lovers.

These definitions have certainly been part of my understanding of love during various seasons of my life. But the first working definition that I ever encountered read something like this:

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.

Pure poetry, thanks to Paul the Apostle. I think I carried this understanding of love with me till I left the Catholic Church, something like ten years ago. And replaced it with other ideas. There was Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, tapping on the door of this tender little heart in my college classroom:

Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken.

So, love as unwavering, unfaltering, immovable. Love as constant and steady. I think I internalized this especially in romantic relationships: digging my heels in when, really, it was time to walk away. I was constant even after constancy was no longer serving me. When it was harming me, and probably the other person. Then there was Fr. Pedro Arrupe’s take on love. Inviting me back, perhaps, to God. And again, with the poetry:

Nothing is more practical than

finding God, than

falling in Love

in a quite absolute, final way.

What you are in love with,

what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.

It will decide

what will get you out of bed in the morning,

what you do with your evenings,

how you spend your weekends,

what you read, whom you know,

what breaks your heart,

and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.

Fall in Love, stay in love,

and it will decide everything.

I remember sitting in a room with a group of women that I had just met, some of whom would become my dearest friends during college, and thinking these words will remain with me forever. I wasn’t really interested in falling in love with God, though. I was interested in falling in love with words, with writing, with poetry. With a creative life. And I was willing to let that decide everything. I still am.

Maybe that sentiment remained with me; but I lost those words for a while. And stumbled back upon Dumbledore, instead:

Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.

And, again:

Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all those who live without love.

When I moved to St. Louis, a year after the murder of Michael Brown, my working definition of love became more practical. More direct: with less poetry and more expectation:

Justice is what love looks like in public.

Still rhythmic, certainly, from Dr. Cornel West. But I find that the words “justice” and “love” are so diluted in our collective rhetoric, that sometimes even this brief declarative statement is difficult for me to wrap my mind around.

In recovery, I learned that love and pity cannot happen alongside each other. That something about pitying another person knocks them down a peg (in your mind); denigrates them even if that was not your intention. In retrospect, when I have pitied other people and mistaken it for love, I often looked upon them as being less capable, less competent; and maybe, ultimately, less human. That the full scope of their humanity hadn’t been realized, and that they needed my help to do so. That, I don’t think, is what it looks like to love another person.

My most recent encounter with ideas about love has been with bell hooks, who meditates on M. Scott Peck’s definition of love in her own work:

The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. Love is an act of will - namely, both an intention and an action. We choose to love.

When I began writing these thoughts, I thought I would reach the end and have the answers about what role I want love to play in this practice of mine, and in my work. I don’t have any answers. Or anymore clarity, really. But I am certain that I keep getting pulled back to this word: with wonder, with curiosity, and with a deep knowing that, eventually, I will need to find an understanding that works for me; and to make room for love.

A Practice for Today:

What are some of the most significant definitions of love that you have encountered? What place does love have in your life? What place does love have in the struggle for liberation?