The Love Conundrum

Our charge:  Love one another as we love ourselves.

Our challenge:  We love the other as we love ourselves-not well.

The greeks broke the word love into four variations.  Eros is the love most people think of when they imagine uttering the phrase, “I love you.”  It is the love of sexual energy, of courtship.  Philia is the love of brotherly affection.  The love you may see amongst sports teams or military comrades.  A band of brothers.  Storge is the love of parents for their children or the love of a mentor or coach for their protege.  A love of being their advocate in growth and development.  And finally agape, the love of the divine.  An unconditional love of grace.  The unmerited favor for someone regardless of how they behave.  The love of a creator in action that is always present and working even when not felt.  Agape is the mature love that the other forms can grow into as they move from conditional to unconditional.

It was just Valentine’s Day.  The day of celebration of love.  The day we prove our affection for the other.  We think of hearts and chocolate, cards and teddy bears.  All very cute stuff.  But what is the love of depth, the love that we crave?  What is the love of oneself that we are called to share with the other?  How do we love ourselves well enough to truly love the other from abundance and not neediness?

I have found that spending time each day in learning myself and honoring myself creates margin and abundant reserves to love others well.  The love that is patient and kind, trusting and hopeful, preserving and rejoicing with the truth.  Each day when I honor myself, I believe I honor my creator.  In this time, I feel gratitude as I create conscious awareness of my gifts, my needs, my current emotional stability, my mental focus and the day coming ahead.  I check in with myself to see how I am.  This time allows me to be more intentional with the coming events of the day.  It allows me to love my mate well, my munchkins well and enables me to view my mission through the lens of how my gifts can be used well to serve others.  Martin Seligman, the father of Positive Psychology, explored the differences between experiencing pleasure and gratification, while illustrating the benefits of augmenting pleasures with gratifications. Experiencing the gratifications of life is found through connecting our strengths to the service of others.  Imagine looking at each moment of your day as an opportunity to practice using your strengths in service of the other.  How could that shape how you “love” your spouse, your child, your neighbor, your boss, your employee, the guy behind the counter at Starbucks, yourself…

What if the abundant living that Jesus spoke of came out of the practice of loving yourself and others by using your gifts to honor your creator in each moment and thus, find the bliss that the Buddha spoke of, releasing the attachment to how things must be and find the joy in how things are.  What is love for you?  Can you communicate it clearly to the other?  Can you give it to yourself?  What are the pursuits of pleasure that can be augmented with the joy of gratifications of service in love, through Agape?