At book club last night the question was asked: what is love? Our book for this month was Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed (the long awaited sequel to international bestseller Eat Pray Love) which is basically a treatise on the history and nature of marriage. Thus the question asked related to romantic love - what the Ancient Greeks called Eros (as opposed to Agape, or non-sexual love).
The discussion that followed tended to be more towards how romantic love is expressed or manifested. The ideas ran along the line of respect for the other, putting up with the other’s shortcomings, the ability to make the other laugh. These describe what love can look like but doesn’t go to what love is. There is something far more fundamental, an essential element, an intangible power that underlies all life and lies at the heart of all our dreams and desires. Love is what we’re all looking for; that which we cannot be without .
Love is what, and who, we are. It is our true nature. Realising this is our task in this life and the trick question we must all solve is how to find the ability and willingness to love in circumstances where love seems to be absent. (I’m not suggesting that anyone should stay in situations of abuse, I’m referring to everyday circumstances where we encounter resentment, indifference, bitterness, and even hatred and unkindness.)
That’s why love always seems to be a struggle, why it seems to involve as much pain as pleasure and why, even though we all have the instinctual capacity for love, we have no idea how to live love.
If truth be told, when asked what love is, most of us run the final scene of our favourite love story in our mind - you know, the one where the handsome lead runs wildly, careless of his own safety, surmounting every obstacle, defeating every impediment, allowing nothing to keep him from his equally beautiful beloved.
This is a part of love, just not all of it. They don’t show you the rest of what love is because it is not pretty.
Love, in reality, is actually more as Sufi mystic Kahlil Gibran describes it in his timeless literary masterpiece, The Prophet:
Like sheaves of corn [love] gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.
Love forces us all to abandon our fantasies, to wake up from our silly dreams and walk the intrepid path of the peaceful warrior. We must be prepared to do what is required, to struggle for love, even if in the process we lose part of ourselves. Know that all we can ever lose is the part of us that is loveless. Once we glimpse love we will gladly let that part go.
Nothing about love is easy. It is the work of a lifetime and even then many of us cannot say we have mastered it, but we keep trying. We have no choice. It is who we are and why we are here.
