from page 82-83
It was common in the Christian circles in which I grew up to reduce love to a discussion of the distinctions between the three greek words for love: agape (self-sacrifice), phileo (familial affection), and eros (passion). By dissecting the word into discrete categories it was possible to elimnate the dangerous and end up with an innocuous but religiously acceptable ideal of love. Seen this way, love became tame at best and hopelessley guilt-producing at worst.
Agape was heralded as the real Christian word for love. It was seen as the highest form of love, carrying the idea of self-sacrifice for another's good. There is no doubt that the biblical writers took the word agape and filled it with new significance. The saw it as the manifestation of God's love for us in stopping to meet us in our need. However, they never saw it in isolation. When seen by itself, agape takes on a legalistic character. It is not measured by its passion or affection. We do not have to like the people we love, we are commanded to love them by laying down our lives for them.
Jesus' command, "Love your enemies," is seen as the ultimate standard or test of agape. As a middle eastern riddle, it is fruitful for meditation. It challenges our categories until we break through beyond definition to a deeper reality. As a definition of love, it is demoralizing for guilt-ridden or codependent people.
Eros has been the real suspect. It is the energy of attraction and the passion for union and fruition. Eros is everywhere in the universe. To come alive to the world beyond our cerebral cortex is to be bombarded with eros. But its emphasis on attraction and passion is so easily deemed primitive and dangerous. It is earthy and therefore not spiritual. In my background it was worldly; passion was simply excluded.
Eros eventually won its place in those circles. It was declared acceptable in marriage. With that clarification, the market was beset, in the 1970's with evangelical Christian books on marriage which extolled the sanctity, the beauty, and even the exercises necessary for vibrant sex. Yet these same Christian sex manuals made it clear that passion is out of place outside of marriage. We were to be erotic only in the bedrooms of our marriages.
This view of eros is safe. And it seems to hold the best of both worlds. It affirms a definable moral stance and at the same time allegedly affirms the passion. Unfortunately, it does not cover all the bases. It does not, for example, address all the unmarried and formerly married people in our society and churches. Are they excluded from passionate love?
Also unfortunately, at least for me as a married person, I don't work that way! And I suspect that most other people don't either. I do not have a toggle switch which allows me to turn amorous desire on and off at will--passionate inside the home and platonic as soon as I open the door and leave the house. This does not mean that I advocate promiscuity, rather, it is the best safeguard against promiscuity. If I am aware of my sexuality and learn to live with it in healthy ways, I will not be taken by surprise as a slave to its demands.
For better or worse, eros is a part of my total experience of life. I can regard that as a mishap that I must guard against or I can begin to embrace it as a part of my vision of love. Rejecting eros and excluding it from love forces the conclusion that passion is a part of one's sinfulness. It is a problem to avoid. Including it as part of my vision of love means that I must find its good and live that as truly as I can.
And to be honest about it, if one cannot be passionate about life in general, it eventually becomes hard to be passionate about God. What passes for religious passion is often nothing more than projected guild or a cover for anger and envy. It can be nothing more than perverted passion as truly as alcoholism is a perversion of passion.
*****
from page 134-137
Dante's greatest gift to our recovery of love is that he offers us a vision of the potency of life around us. He discovers the presence of God in the world around him just a Eckhart discovered the presence of God within his own soul.
Just as the return home to ourselves calls for a radical transformation; so also the recognition of God in the exchanges of passionate love around us calls for transformation and growth. This growth involves welcoming the potency of our passion for life, letting go of the ways we cling to it or distort it, finding in the passion the freedom to make constructive choices, and finally, following our passion to its goal of mystical union with God.
For Dante, as for many, the way to this growth in love was through a return to the childhood experience of adoration. Children have the wonderful ability, in one fell moment, to be enraptured. A balloon, a toy or a candy suddenly overwhelms the child's attention. Time vanishes as the child gazed through the portals of this world into a world alive with wonder.
Children have eyes to see beyond the labels we put on things. They see God present, lighting the world with glory and delight. They naturally sense the glory and respond with adoration and desire. They have not yet learned how to hide their passion.
We have the privilege of welcoming this wide-eyed child and incorporating his or her sense of wonder into our own recovery of love. We never really outgrow our past. Our childhood is as much a part of our present as the inner rings of the tree are part of the tree's present life. We will learn, if we choose to follow, to see our world potent with the passion of love.
This reveals the core of Dante's exploration. Did that original nine-year-old fascination with Beatrice have credibility? Is the passion for adoration and self-giving a window into eternity? Dante is more specific. Can a romantic or sexual attraction be a doorway into God?
A young boy is love-struck over the girl with the big brown eyes. A little girl adores her strong and friendly teacher. Two adults, each married, discover they have passion for each other. Do these experiences carry the seeds of grace and the presence of the divine life? These are the questions Dante poses for us.
We might ask, "Is living passionately a truly viable way of spirituality? Is amor (Dante's word for love) to be cherished everywhere, or is it too dangerous for spirituality? Is spirituality about the honoring of or the policing of romantic and sexual love?"
Romantic love is not the only possible horizon here, it is only the most controversial. Passion for skiing, golf, or fishing, passion for one's career as a musician or corporate executive, passion for justice, these are all the arena of love. Dante will go further. Passion expressed destructively as wrath or violence is also a doorway into growth and into God. We are invited to go to the roots and discover the truth of love that resides at the core of even the most distorted passion.
Passion is, in its essence, the bubbling up of Divine Love at the center of our being. It is, in the words of Gerald May, "our best gift, our most treasured possession." One of the early church writers spoke of desire as the highway of God into the soul.
Passion does not go away. As in anger, if it is not welcomed it will become devious and find some distorted expression. Choosing to accept the passion, however it comes, without clinging either to the object of the passion or to the need for fulfillment is the way of transformation. Both the moments of union and the moments of unfulfilled longing become great healing gifts.
Accepting the passion unconditionally faces one with the reality of choice. There is no choice if the passion is not received. What, for example, does a person know of moral purity who lived so fearfully that intimacy was never a possibility? Choice become a real possibility when longing is accepted and fulfillment is celebrated but not demanded. This is the place of freedom, the place where "all things are yours."
Therefore, to categorize passion as dangerous or to squelch it in the name of piety is to thwart the very essence of life with which we relate not only to our outside world but also to God.
Passion must be accepted and honored. Desire and longing must be welcomed unconditionally as a rightful occupant in one's life, before it is crushed with cautions, if it is ever to become fruitful in our spiritual and emotional growth.
Dante's own experience fired the genius of this high vision. He did not have an affair with Beatrice. He married and had children with a woman named Gemma. Beatrice also married. Yet Dante never denied his love nor demanded its gratification. He followed the passion of adoration to its truth. Had he demanded the fulfillment of his passion through an affair with Beatrice or denied his passion because he was married to Gemma, he might never have composed a poem with the grandeur of The Divine Comedy.
Dante also helps us to bring our vision of love to wholeness. He encourages us to accept not only the radical denial of all attachments in our return home to ourselves, but also the radical affirmation of the very objects of our passion and of the passion itself. It is the final redemption of the addictive cycle.
I wish I had written this.
It's the best thing I've ever read on love.
Period.
Brad Jersak
Posted by: Brad Jersak | July 23, 2006 at 10:40 PM