Perfect Love, part one

Part one of a series

Love at the center of the inward journey toward God.

“The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. ”

Love, as one of the more complex human emotions, comes to us in many forms. Christian theologian C.S. Lewis defined love in four ways : storge or affection (especially between parent and child), philia or friendship, eros or erotic love, and agape or spiritual love (Lewis calls this “charity”). We experience all of these loves to varying degrees at different times, and yet there are precious few instances in which we speak of our love as perfect, complete, or unconditional and actually mean it. We cannot give our love away freely to all that ask for it, for in the giving of love we are also giving of ourselves, and if that love is not returned, eventually our stores will be depleted.

The sole exception is in the last kind of love—charitable or spiritual love. Where the first three types love are defined as emotion and feeling, spiritual love is rooted in action and behavior. Emotion or feeling may not play into spiritual love at all, or if it does, we may feel merely a sense of duty or propriety. Spiritual love is not affection; we are not asked to feel anything in particular for those around us. Spiritual love asks us not to feel, but to do. We are asked to manifest goodness and kindness in our actions­­­­—to “heal the world”, to borrow one of my favorite Jewish philosophies. We are asked to recognize the face of the sacred in all people and all things around us. This is perhaps one of the most fundamental aspects of process theology—the firm recognition that the sacred is tenable, dwelling within and around us. Just as we are the central players in our own lives, the most important viewpoint in our world, so is everyone else the most important aspect of their own world.

In his groundbreaking book I and Thou, Jewish philosopher Martin Buber suggests that the most sacred relationship is between I and You*. It would be easy for us to treat all other people around us as merely objects—“its”, to use Buber’s terminology. In the “I-It” manner of viewing life, people are mechanisms, tools, useful and important only insofar as they play a certain role in our lives. They are not inherently sacred in their own right. But once we recognize each person as a You, as his own “I” and therefore equally as important as we and equally as divine as we, our interactions with people change. We see them as we see ourselves—central, integral, utterly important for no other reason than that they exist. Buber writes, “He is no longer He or She, limited by other Hes and Shes, a dot in the world grid of space and time . . . . Neighborless and seamless, he is You and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light.” Everyone we encounter, whether central to our own lives or barely peripheral, is the main actor in his play, the director of his story. He is his own person, a unique manifestation of Deity, and any interaction with him has the potential to be a divine interaction, if only we allow ourselves to treat it as such.

This is what spiritual love means. To allow ourselves to interact with every person as though they were divinity incarnate—for in a way, they are. Within every individual is the divine spark, a glimmer of the eternal You from which all the universe is sprung. In approaching each interaction with an individual as interaction with the sacred, we offer ourselves up to the Divine, speaking to it, loving and serving it. Buber writes, “In every sphere through everything that becomes present to us, we gaze toward the train of the eternal You; in each we perceive a breath of it; in every You we address the eternal You in every sphere according to its manner.”

To love perfectly, then, does not require a fondness for any particular person—not the people we are fighting with, nor the people in our workplace, nor the people we pass on the street. It does not require emotion at all. It requires diligence, a willful commitment to honoring all of humanity and ecology—all the natural world—as manifestations of the sacred. In perfect love, we are not granted the luxury of loving only half-heartedly, or when it is convenient, or when it will serve our purposes. We are not allowed to act purely selfishly nor purely selflessly, for if we do not value ourselves, we cannot fully value others as their own “I”. We must seek a balance in the way we treat others and are treated by others. To love perfectly is to love ourselves divinely, to honor ourselves divinely, and to love and honor the divine in those around us. Perfect love is, like faith, an act of our entire being. The divine in us honors the divine in everything around us, and acts accordingly. Perfect love shifts our vision away from the selfish Me toward a holistic network in which all things are important, interdependent, and sacred.

Notes about the text:Originally Buber’s use of the German Du was translated as “Thou”, hence the English title of his work. However, translator Walter Kaufmann points out that the treatment of Du as Thou rather than You implies to modern readers a certain formality and distance that is not mitigated in Buber’s work. In fact, if anything, Buber encourages an intimate rendering of the idea of You, a close spiritual relationship amongst individuals. Therefore, instead of the traditional Thou I will translate Buber’s Du as You as Kaufmann does.

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