To Know Love, To Love, and To Be Loved

Douglas Steere spoke and wrote of “A Love at the Heart of Things.”  Just the other day I read Martin Luther King’s words: “Agape means nothing sentimental or affectionate.  It means understanding, redeeming good will for all men.  It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return.  It is the love of God working in the lives of men.  When we rise to love on the agape level we love others not because we like them, not because their attitudes and ways appeal to us, but because God loves us.”  Saints, poets, and singers of songs have all shared their experiences of love—and  of a “Love at the Heart of Things.”

In every human being there is this insatiable desire and need; this unquenchable yearning to be loved and to know love.  We were born with this desire, this deep need and yearning.  I don’t suppose it is ever completely satisfied, but the desire, need, and yearning for love never dies.  The reason it never dies is because it is our true identity (to know love, to love, and to be loved).  It is our reason for being.  

The purpose of humanity—the reason“we are put on earth a little space,” William Blake tells us is “that we might learn to bear the beams of love.”  Gerald May suggested  “three meanings of bearing love:  to endure it, to carry it, and to bring it forth.”  We are meant to grow in our capacity to endure love’s beauty, wonder, and pain.  We are meant to carry love and spread it around.  We are called to bring new love into the world—to be “birthers of love.”  This is our three-fold longing, this is our deepest need, our most sought after thing in all the world—to know love, to love, and to be loved.  This desire is who we are.  We are born with it and it never sleeps.

Have you experienced it—this love, and a “Love at the Heart of Things?”  I have.  I’ve experienced it just sitting alone in my study. I’ve experienced it looking out upon a desert, mountaintop or watching the rain fall.  I’ve experienced it even while pulling weeds in the flowerbed. I’ve experienced  it in moments of deep pain and grief.  I’ve experienced just being in love.  Haven’t you?  It wasn’t love for any particular thing or any particular person.  It was, instead, a feeling of being immersed in an atmosphere of love.  It was a feeling of being alive—really alive!  It was a sense of being intimately connected with everything around me.  These moments (often fleeting moments) of  just being in love is the “heart” of the human spirit.  Love is really inescapable, you know.  It is the deepest desire of our hearts. We were born for it. Love is what causes us to care.