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What is Love?
By Rev. Paul V. Scholl
What is Love? The eternal question we all carry around deep within our
hearts. Love is the eternal search. Love is eternal when we find it. But
do we really ever find it? When we define it do we negate it? When we
set limits on what we believe to be love do we begin to destroy it by
hoping to understand or own it for ourselves? We offer it through our
actions, through our gifts, through our poetry and song, we give it with
our lives. Through all of our relationships we vary our giving, often
by what we hope to receive in return. But is this really love?
I recently overheard someone say in a conversation that there is no such
thing as "unconditional love". I would have to agree, although
for different reasons. Love within itself is unconditional. Anything else
is only an attempt to love, a learning to get us nearer to the one true
knowing of love. It may be honorable, well intentioned, passionate and
desiring, courageous and pure. It may be felt as temporary, but if lost
easily it may not have been love at all. Love can not be corrupted, but
attempts to know love can be thwarted and often fall short of what we
hope love will be. This is where we learn we are human.
Love has been experienced as a life of living poetry. Love has been experienced
as being the very notes of song, uplifting and generous to the wanting
ear. Love has been experienced as the final act of giving one's life for
another in battle. Love has been experienced as choosing to give new life
to another. Love has been experienced as a devoted oneness with God. Love
has been experienced as an endless passionate overflow of emotion in the
arms of a waiting lover.
Love is defined for us as "strong or passionate affection for a person",
or "a warm liking, fond or tender feeling", or " a genuine
emotion, emphasizing strength, depth, sincereness, devotion, loyalty,
reverence, or passion, as for God, a man, a woman or a belief." Powerful
ideas all. We know each of these definitions or ideas for ourselves. What
we do with them is what makes us who we are in our lives. And what do
you do with the love granted to you each day? How many times do we deny
its expression from others because we fear what our own expressions will
bring? Are we not denying our creator every time we deny the expression
of love?
Lost, empty, alone and searching. As individuals who have experienced
separation or divorce, or even the loss of a loved one to death, the separation
can be the most traumatic experience we live through. The heart wrenching
pain that seems to never really go away, the enormous waves that hit us
daily, the times we hit the wall right after a strong and uplifting experience
reminds us that we are learning. We are learning about strength, passion
for our own life, about our own sincerity in our beliefs, about our loyalty
to who we are, and certainly about our own genuineness. We search for
that day when love will come again. We search everywhere, everyday, almost
every hour.
It has been said for centuries that "love is where the eyes meet
with passion, for the eyes can not hide what the heart feels." So
we have learned to look outward for this eternal love that will fulfill
us, forgetting that it must first fill our own hearts. Perhaps that is
why we fall into such pain and agony and sorrow when a love affair fails?
It is at that moment that we realize we did not fail the other person
we expressed love to, but we have somehow not fulfilled ourselves once
again. We combat failure with a misunderstood unfulfilled promise. We
lose it, not knowing if we will ever find it again. The emotional tides
lift and fall, crash and settle, then lift again.
No one else, no matter how much we talk or cry, can pull us through the
anxious hours of soul repair and growth. It is our own fire within that
needs rekindling, guarding against the winds that would blow it out and
leave us dark, cold and helpless. It is at this time we find the love
that binds us together with every other being that surrounds us on the
planet. Eventually we find the sun still rises to meet us in the morning
and the stars continue to show us the way each night. The rivers still
flow downstream into oceans that will never turn them away. The trees
still reach upward every day praising the God that made them. We stand
up straight and take a lesson from it all.
What if you woke up one morning and realized that you were the only person
left on the face of the earth? Who would you love? Why do we wait so long
to start the journey that begins in the same place that it ends? Love,
in all its endlessness, unboundedness and failed definitions is this experience.
And in opening up to let it go, without need of owning or even sometimes
knowing its return, we open ourselves up to experiencing it more. We expand
with the universe and not against it. We feel the stars for the first
time. We feel the night for the first time. We feel God for the first
time.
Love doesn't ask why. It doesn't come. It doesn't go. It just is. It is
not only in our hands, it is our hands. It isn't only in our heart, it
is what makes our heart beat every beat. It wraps itself around us so
securely that all we need to do to survive against all odds is to recognize
it as the very breathe we just drew, and the last breathe we just let
go.
Love is the very Power of the Universe, every beat, every spin, every
pulse, every move. And this is what you have to give.
Rev. Paul V. Scholl
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