The demands of love

When we are responsible, we have to care about others. Steven Garber wrote:

They are people who "get it" – as in, I wonder why she doesn't "get it." Or, he "gets it," doesn't he? There is something about heart and mind together in that assessment. They are people who are more than smart, because they understand that it is possible to get all A's and still flunk life. In biblical imagery, they are people with ears that hear, and eyes that see. They are people who know that to know – in a deeply biblical sense – means to be responsible, and that to be responsible means to care.

This caring is "difficult, demanding and dangerous," as Nick Shere wrote:

We may need to kill, but – ironic though it sounds – if we kill, we must kill with love, kindness, care and sorrow. And we must never, ever look upon the life of another with hatred or without compassion. Love is not easy, safe or simple. It is difficult, demanding and dangerous. To love is to surrender safety, and safety, just now, is very precious indeed. But this danger does not make love any less necessary, and I would say the risk of becoming what we hate is a far greater one then the risk of universal love.

It is neither guaranteed to us nor is it something we can choose at will. It is "a fundamental condition of our lives" that can increase or decrease, that can be gained or lost, but that we must contend with. Greg Epstein:

Love is not just some voluntary, extracurricular activity that we can pick up and put down when we please. And it's not some set or fixed biological reality totally predetermined by our genes to make us miserable or blissful, or both at the same time. The degree to which we have love is a fundamental condition of our lives, like the degree to which we have housing, clothing, money, education, or access to crude oil fields.

Just like any of the other fundamental conditions of life, if we don't have love, we may be able to get it with hard work – and if we do have it, we shouldn't get too haughty about it, because we can lose it at any moment.

Love is not essentially or always self-sacrificial, but it may be called upon to sacrifice. Wendell Berry wrote: "Love is not, by its own desire, heroic. It is heroic only when compelled to be. It exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble, and unrewarded." Ford Madox Ford wrote: "I am not going to be so American as to say that all true love demands some sacrifice. It doesn’t. But I think that love will be truer and more permanent in which self-sacrifice has been exacted." Thus, Elizabeth Gilbert: “...every intimacy carries, secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.”

Sources

"To See What You See: On Liturgy & Learning & Life." Steven Garber. Printed in Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog. Edited by Raewynne J. Whiteley and Beth Maynard. Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 2003. p. 10.

Nick Shere, "Love must guide us on our path to justice and action," Brown Daily Herald, Monday, September 24, 2001.

Greg Epstein. Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe. William Morrow, 2009. p. 81.

Wendell Berry. "Word and Flesh" in What are People For? San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990. p. 200. Quoted in "A Wedding Sermon for Nathan and Sandie" by Steven Garber, printed in Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog. Edited by Raewynne J. Whiteley and Beth Maynard. Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 2003. p. 119.

Ford Madox Ford. The Good Soldier. Originally 1915. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1995. p 80.

Elizabeth Gilbert. Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. New York: Viking, 2010. p. 5.

Evil is the shadow: Spotting evil within us and without

When we do not recognize evil as our own shadow and see it only as an external enemy, we cannot defeat it. It grows within us. James Weldon Johnson said, "We light upon one evil and hit it with all the might of our civilization, but only succeed in scattering it into a dozen of other forms."

Sometimes we present evil as complex, yet still mostly external to ourselves, as Barry Holstun Lopez wrote of the wolf:

The human mind entertains itself with such symbols and metaphors, sorting out the universe in an internal monologue, and I think it delights in wolves. The wolf is a sometime symbol of evil, and the mind dotes on distinctions between good and evil. He is a symbol of the warrior, and we are privately concerned with our own courage and nobility. The wolf's is also a terrifying image, and the human mind likes to frighten itself.

That evil is in ourselves, too, is probably one reason why self-sacrifice seems to be an effective form of transformation. When we allow ourselves, as M. Scott Peck put it, "to be pierced by the evil of others," we may "survive and not succumb." Their evil kills our evil. By identifying it in them and letting it in, we identify it in ourselves and let it out. Peck:

The healing of evil – scientifically or otherwise – can be accomplished only by the love of individuals. A willing sacrifice is required. The individual healer must allow his or her own soul to become the battleground. He or she must sacrificially absorb the evil.

Then what prevents the destruction of that soul? If one takes the evil itself into one's heart, like a spear, how can one's goodness still survive? Even if the evil is vanquished thereby, will not the good be also? What will have been achieved beyond some meaningless trade-off?

I cannot answer this in language other than mystical. I can say only that there is a mysterious alchemy whereby the victim becomes the victor. As C. S. Lewis wrote: "When a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards."

I do not know how this occurs. But I know that it does. I know that good people can deliberately allow themselves to be pierced by the evil of others – to be broken thereby yet somehow not broken – to even be killed in some sense and yet still survive and not succumb. Whenever this happens there is a slight shift in the balance of power in the world.

James Densley, interviewed in 2022:

If we explain this problem as pure evil or other labels like terrorist attack or hate crime, we feel better because it makes it seem like we’ve found the motive and solved the puzzle. But we haven’t solved anything. We’ve just explained the problem away. What this really problematic terminology does is prevent us from recognizing that mass shooters are us. This is hard for people to relate to because these individuals have done horrific, monstrous things. But three days earlier, that school shooter was somebody’s son, grandson, neighbor, colleague or classmate. We have to recognize them as the troubled human being earlier if we want to intervene before they become the monster.

Sources

Author and activist James Weldon Johnson, quoted in The Wall Street Journal. The Week, March 21, 2014. p. 17.

Barry Holstun Lopez. Of Wolves and Men. New York, Simon and Shuster, 1978; first Touchstone edition, 1995. p 226.

M. Scott Peck, M.D. People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil. (1983) New York: Touchstone, 1998. p. 269. Quoting C. S. Lewis. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. (Collier/Macmillan, 1970), p. 160.

"Two Professors Found What Creates a Mass Shooter. Will Politicians Pay Attention?" Melanie Warner, interviewing Jillian Peterson and James Densley. Politico. May 27, 2022.

Taking a stand for peace: Inside or outside the tribe?

Community is important, but there is a risk of being subsumed into a collectivity in a way that diminishes one's ability to see the humanity of others outside it. Jeremy Driscoll:

It is possible to say we in a mistaken and dangerous way. This would be the we of a nation or any group that is said at the expense of the individual subject, the individual I, such that there are no Is in the we; their only identity is their we. Sometimes people are forced into such a we, as in totalitarian governments; other times they choose it, as in a radical and mindless belonging to a group. When there is this kind of we, it is possible to look at others as only a they...

One can stand outside all tribes to defend an ideology of peace, but then, belonging to none, one receives the scorn from all. Alan Watts:

It is both dangerous and absurd for our world to be a group of communions mutually excommunicate. This is especially true of the great cultures of the East and the West, where the potentialities of communication are the richest, and the dangers of failure to communicate the worst. ... On the one hand, it is necessary to be sympathetic and to experiment personally with the way of life to the limit of one's possibilities. On the other hand, one must resist every temptation to "join the organization," to become involved with its institutional commitments. In this friendly neutral position one is apt to be disowned by both sides.


But even when disowned by people, one may have the company of one's ideals. Balzac in The Inventor’s Suffering refers to "moral aloneness," which Erich Fromm describes as the thing that monks and political prisoners lack – they are not alone because they have the company of their convictions.

To practice peace is to have the ability to see suffering others – when it really counts, when one can do something about it – as part of one human family, regardless of tribe. Michael Lerner:

Imagine that you lived in a family in which there were five children. One of those children had been given 40 percent of the resources of the family, a second had 32 percent, a third had 20 percent, a fourth was struggling with 6 percent of the resources, and one was starving to death with only 2 percent of the resources. Surely you would reject the argument of the richest child who praised the arrangements and pointed to the way that it was good for the family because a majority of the children were thriving. You’d say: “No, it is unacceptable to see one of these children starving and another struggling so hard to survive. This is a crazy and immoral arrangement, and it must immediately be changed. I will not be part of any arrangement that has these consequences.” The only reason we don’t say that about the world we live in today is because we refuse to acknowledge these others as actually part of our family.

Legal scholar Noura Erakat says "I don’t just study law," because

"I don’t think that our transformation is going to come from some logic. If this was a logical matter, you would just agree. But logic isn’t doing the work. There’s a spiritual transformation that has to happen here. How do we tap into that spiritual realm? And I see it a lot. I’m really, really hopeful. Just the amount of sacrifice and the courage that people have made, that is spiritual transformation. That’s spirit work." ("The Limits of the Law," Noura Erakat interviewed by Afeef Nessouli, Fall 2024 issue of Acacia (Issue 2))

Sources

Jeremy Driscoll, O.S.B. A Monk's Alphabet: Moments of Stillness in a Turning World. Boston: New Seeds, 2006. p. 196.

Alan Watts. The Way of Zen. Originally 1957. Vintage Spiritual Classics Edition 1999. p xi-xii.

Erich Fromm. Escape from Freedom. New York: Avon, 1941. pp. 34-35.

Michael Lerner. The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right. HarperSanFrancisco, 2006. p. 341-342.

Quotes on the nature/nurture theories of growth

Natalie Angier mentioned David S. Moore's book The Dependent Gene which explores the meaning of genetic determination. "No matter how seemingly hard-wired a trait...the outside finds its way in, and the inside responds."

2003 marked the 50th anniversary of James D. Watson and Francis Crick's discovery of DNA. As Angier put it, "The molecule that for so long exemplified youthful bravado, vast promise and vaster self-regard has become another aging, pot-bellied baby boomer." She interviewed many scientists who agreed that we are created by a combination of our environment and our genes. After all, "DNA, on its own, does nothing." It contains instructions for making special proteins, but it needs to be surrounded by proteins who can carry out the instructions.

Barbara J. King wrote:

But we do not inherit a gene "for" shyness" or a gene "for" depression or a gene "for" spirituality; at most, we may inherit a tendency to express shy qualities or aspects of depression or spiritual yearnings when the environmental context – including the expression of belongingness in our lives – is ripe for that expression.

Stephen Jay Gould wrote: "If innate only means possible, or likely in certain environments, then everything we do is innate and the word has no meaning." Rollo May wrote: "Everyone who has observed his own development with wonder will be aware that there is both nature and nurture in every step of this actualization of his potentialities."

Paulo Coelho wrote:

"What's the world's greatest lie?" the boy asked, completely surprised.

"It's this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That's the world's greatest lie."

Jennifer Finney Boylan wrote:

"Well, when I [Jenny Boylan] was a man, it was something I decided I'd do. It was something that I woke up every morning and convinced myself I could do, that it was something that I had to do." * * * Barbara looked alarmed. "You mean you [Richard Russo, her husband] could have decided to be anybody?" "Not anybody, but the person I became. I think we are who we are because consciously, or unconsciously, we choose ourselves." * * * The conversation we had about how and whether people 'choose' to be themselves has stayed with me, though – and it is interesting how you spoke of deciding consciously to become yourself. It was interesting that Barb said she couldn't imagine this, and that the idea of choosing fate like that was strange to her. It gave me the helpful insight that I really did 'choose' to be Jim every single day, but that once I put my sword down I haven't chosen Jenny at all; I simply wake up and here I am.

Amos Oz wrote:

"Let me teach you that Man does not walk by chance. Moreover, Man does not walk."

"What do you mean, Man does not walk?"

"Simply this: Man does not walk except to where he is led. And he is not led except to where his heart desires, and his heart does not desire unless the desire be from the depths of his soul."

Sources

"Not Just Genes: Moving Beyond Nature vs. Nurture" by Natalie Angier. www.nytimes.com Feb. 25, 2003.

Barbara J. King. Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion. New York: Doubleday, 2007. p. 199.

Stephen Jay Gould. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton and Co, 1981. p. 330.

Rollo May, Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence, New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1972. p 122.

Paulo Coelho. The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream. (1988) Translated by Alan R. Clarke. (1993) New York: HarperCollins, 1998. p 20.

Jennifer Finney Boylan. She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders. New York: Broadway Books, 2003. p 161-2, 180.

Amos Oz. In the Land of Israel. (1983) Translated by Maurie Goldberg-Bartura. USA: Harcourt, Inc., 1993. pp. 14-15.

Quotes on our embodiment and our language

Our physical gestures may be part of our speech, an ability that is surely culturally conditioned but that may also be innate, one that we cannot help but express. Marco Iacoboni:

"...even though we know the gestures can't be seen, we all tend to gesture when we speak over the phone. Indeed, we gesture when we talk to the blind, and the congenitally blind also gesture when they talk, even though they have never seen people gesturing.

"Bizarre? Not really. In his book Hand and Mind, David McNeill argues that 'gestures and language are one system,' that 'gestures are an integral part of language as much as are words, phrase, and sentences.' ...if her hand moves under the left side of the [mathematical] equation, then stops, then moves again under the right side of the equation, the movement reveals that her mind is starting to grasp the concept that an equation has two sides that are separate but somehow related. ...her hand may form a narrow C to indicate the skinny glass and a wider C to indicate the wider dish. While her words focus only on the difference in height between glass and dish, her hands emphasize the compensatory greater width of the dish, compared with the glass. With her hands, she's catching on, and the words will soon follow."

This may be due in large part to the things that we think about and discuss. Many of the topics we verbalize have a physical reality. Ray Kurzweil:

"Now consider: How many of Molly's [diary] entries would make sense if she didn't have a body? Most of Molly's mental activities are directed toward her body and its survival, security, nutrition, image, not to mention related issues of affection, sexuality, and reproduction. But Molly is not unique in this regard. I invite my other readers to look at their own diaries. And if you don't have one, consider what you would write in it if you did. How many of your entries would make sense if you didn't have a body?"

Our bodily awareness comes to us at a young age before we are capable of other abstract thought. Rollo May:

"This also means that we need to recover our awareness of our bodies. An infant gets part of his early sense of personal identity through awareness of his body. 'We may call the body as experienced by the infant,' says Gardner Murphy, 'The first core of the self.' ... Since such [physical sensations, sexual and otherwise] are a way of identifying himself, the taboo would clearly imply, 'Your image of yourself is dirty.' This undoubtedly is one important part of the origin of the tendency to despise the self in our society."

J. Drew Lanham:

"In all my time in the outdoors, I've yet to have a wild creature question my identity. Not a single cardinal or ovenbird has ever paused in dawnsong declaration to ask the reason for my being."

Sources

Marco Iacoboni. Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect With Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. pp. 79-81.

Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. New York: Penguin Group, 1999. p. 134.

Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself, New York: W.W.Norton & Co., Inc., 1953. p 106.

Dr. J. Drew Lanham. Interviewed by Leah Penniman. Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations With Black Environmentalists. Amistad, 2023. Chapter: Each One Teach One.”

Quotes on infatuation

Nicholas Fearn:

In the summer of 1999, Cornell University published research purporting to show that love really is a drug. To be precise, it is a cocktail of dopamine, phenylethylamine and oxytocin in the bloodstream that produces the sensation we call infatuation. Love, the researchers argued, was in fact a chemically induced form of insanity. This condition lasts until the body builds up an immunity to the substances involved, which is usually just long enough to meet, mate and raise a child to early infancy.

I no longer see early attachment as a distinctly newborn emotion, separate from our adult feeling. The experience – the qualia – of grown-up love is shaped by a thousand memories flashing through your head as the emotion washes over you: memories of past loves, romantic poetry, Audrey Hepburn movies, and most of all memories of the person who triggers the feeling in you. Newborn children haven’t lived long enough to assemble all those memories, and they don’t have a memory system developed enough to record or play back that remembered complexity. But grown-up love is also a chemical feeling, one that has effects on our memory systems, but also one that possesses a life of its own. We don’t know the exact ingredients of the cocktail, and no doubt the proportions of its ingredients differ from person to person. But some mix of oxytocin and endorphins is likely pivotal to the feeling.

I believe it’s this chemistry that we share with our children, even children in their first days of life. When our son switches from tantrums to giggles at the sight of his mother entering a room, he’s doing so because the sight of her face has released a host of chemicals in his head – the same chemicals flooding his mother’s brain as she gazes back at him. Infants don’t have words for the feeling, and it isn’t accompanied by the rich tapestry of memories invoked by grown-up attachment. But some essential part of the feeling is mirrored in those two brains. It’s nice to think that each of us has unique ways of feeling love, but there are times when the shared experience is more moving. At some point in your first days of life, your brain began sending signals to you saying: you’re safe with this person; keep close to her. Decades later, you’re still getting the same message.

Emerald Robinson says on the Daily Orbit video:

Mother Nature’s Love Potion #9 may have a darker side. New research says that the hormone oxytocin, or the love hormone known to produce those warm, fuzzy feelings of love, is also responsible for intense emotional pain. Um yeah, have they not heard love hurts? Researchers say the hormone strengthens social memory, so if you have a negative or stressful experience, the hormone activates a part of your brain that intensifies the memory. But, on the flip side, it does the same for good experiences, therefore increasing feelings of well-being. Oxytocin has been tested as an anti-anxiety drug and researchers say by understanding its dual role in triggering or reducing anxiety, depending on the social context, they can optimize oxytocin treatments. Well, hurt me once shame on you, hurt me twice – shame on my oxytocin for not helping me remember the first time.

Elizabeth Gilbert:

The problem with infatuation, of course, is that it's a mirage, a trick of the eye – indeed, a trick of the endocrine system. Infatuation is not quite the same thing as love; it's more like love's shady second cousin who's always borrowing money and can't hold down a job. When you become infatuated with somebody, you're not really looking at that person; you're just captivated by your own reflection, intoxicated by a dream of completion that you have projected on a virtual stranger. We tend, in such a state, to decide all sorts of spectacular things about our lovers that may or may not be true. We perceive something almost divine in our beloved, even if our friends and family might not get it. One man's Venus is another man's bimbo, after all, and somebody else might easily consider your personal Adonis to be a flat-out boring little loser.

* * *

So, yes, my love affair with Felipe had a wonderful element of romance to it, which I will always cherish. But it was not an infatuation, and here's how I can tell: because I did not demand that he become my Great Emancipator or my Source of All Life, nor did I immediately vanish into that man's chest cavity like a twisted, unrecognizable, parasitical homunculus. During our long period of courtship, I remained intact within my own personality, and I allowed myself to meet Felipe for who he was.

Alan Watts:

The gist of [Denis de Rougemont's] thesis [in Love in the Western World] is that mature sexual love is total devotion to the entirety of another human being – as distinct from bodily lust or passion, which he describes as being in love with being in love, passion in particular being an infatuation with the subjective feelings aroused by postponing sexual intercourse with an idealized woman.

Gerard Donovan: "Love may indeed be all sweet chemicals and nothing to do with divine intervention or a cherub with a bow and arrow. But let your heart enjoy it."

Sources

Nicholas Fearn, How to Think Like a Philosopher. New York: Grove Press, 2001. p 1.

“The Brain in Love.” Steven Johnson ’90. Brown Alumni Monthly. July/August 2004. p. 43.

"Oxytocin Has A Darker Side." Emerald Robinson, The Daily Orbit July 24, 2013.

Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. New York: Viking, 2010. pp. 101, 105-106.

Alan Watts, Nature, Man, and Woman (1958). New York: Vintage Books, 1991. p 174

Gerard Donovan. Schopenhauer's Telescope: A Novel. New York: Counterpoint, 2003. p 299.

Connecting to others while maintaining a sense of self

Rainer Maria Rilke: "Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky."

Alan Watts: "Profound love reveals what other people really are: beings in relation, not in isolation." One such relation is union. Erich Fromm: "Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self." This self-integrity is essential. Maria Lugones: "Love is seen not as fusion and erasure of difference but as incompatible with them [fusion and erasure of difference]." Connection leads to love, and love indicates this connection. James Redfield: "I consider love a barometer for my own connection." This is the thing that must be done: Fritz Buri: "The task of theology is not to prove that God is love but to show that love constitutes the fulfillment of human existence."

This can be found and it can be lived: given and received.

Charlie Morris:

"It is important to know though, primarily, that unconditional love isn’t rare. It is just that it is, as of yet, something that humans are rarely able to experience and share with one another. Unconditional love is the basis of all reality. Existence is love itself. But when you can’t experience this first hand, and something in you aches for it...and you are still not sure what it is that you are searching for...you will find yourself in the 'depression'. And thank God for that. Thank God for the knowing that something isn’t quite right with the world. Without the depression, you would never try to climb out and into a new way of living. And if you never fall into the depression, you are either on the side of not knowing you cannot love...or trying really hard to receive love from people who are not capable of offering it."

Catullus: "sis in amore potens" (may you be capable of love).

Sources

Rainer Maria Rilke, "Letters," quoted by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are, p 255.

Alan Watts, Nature, Man, and Woman, p 199.

Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, 1955. Quoted in Ray Billington. Religion Without God. Routledge: New York, 2002. p 106.

Maria Lugones, "Playfulness, 'World-Travelling,' and Loving Perception," Hypatia 2, no 2 (Summer 1987):3. Quoted in "The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism," by Karen J. Warren, in Ecological Feminist Philosophies edited by Karen J. Warren. Indiana University Press, 1996.

James Redfield, quoted in "The Evolution Revolution." Interview by Anne A. Simpkinson. Copyright (c) 2002 Beliefnet, Inc.

Fritz Buri. How Can We Still Speak Responsibly of God? Translated by Chary D. Hardwick. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968. p 40.

"'Depression'—Revised." Charlie Morris. Feb. 10, 2012. Accessed Feb. 11, 2012.

Catullus, Poem C