Love is a series of discoveries. A life. A walk. And even a narration. M. Scott Peck defined love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” He then works from this to say that we do not fall in love without falling out of love. Love is not a feeling. It is a risk of: loss, independence and commitment. Love is disciplined and separateness. He then breaks the whole thing down into stages in his later work. He describes love (in the context of any relationship) as honeymoon, chaos and emptying. Love, fully matured, willfully extends oneself knowing that in giving they are not seeking to change the will of another.
They are beyond offering themselves as love agents with hidden agendas. And this is not a place you arrive one day, it is a daily practice. However, the nature of any relationship seems to move naturally from the lightness of first impressions, to the chaos of trying to impose your will on another-so you can love them based upon your conditions, and finally you see and know the other well enough to still choose their betterment. The sad thing is that most relationships, romantic or non, end or stop growing once they reach the second stage. Often we feel their is nothing past this stage to discovery. But beyond chaos is open space, beyond codependence to mutuality. Really beautiful stuff.
A while back I was told I was easy to like and hard to love. And I couldn’t agree more. But the trouble is, someone has to know me, and I them, well enough to exist in the chaos while practicing active loving, the kind that is selfless-naked-pure-honest. Love, I am learning is along the way. It is journey and it takes you to places of abandonment. The beautiful thing is, that in abandonment there is surrender. And when we live open, free and set on by this pursuit of love, all sorts of newness bleeds out of honest moments when we attempt to love better than the bar culture sets or our parents have modeled. Love is always uncharted territory, risky because we don’t know. We don’t know fully the other and we don’t know fully ourselves in relation to them. We shape each other in community, in mutuality along the way.
So, there is something very grounding about love. Specifically, being loved by a higher power-something beyond yourself and others-an inbreaking Presence. The nature of this Presence is community and self-giving embodied individuality that seeks the honest offering of bold love, and so us. As we seek to see the other as brother or sister. As we set lovers free as birds to be known by the air. And as we love like our lives depended on it, as if it were its substance.
