“Love lifts us up where we belong,
where eagles fly, on a mountain high.
Love makes us act like we are fools,
throw our lives away, for one happy day.
We should be lovers!
We can't do that...” - Moulin Rouge
Love.
In the grand scheme of the American
vocabulary, we use the word for lots of things. That fact alone has
led many to discard the word altogether.
God is love.
In the grand scheme of the American
vocabulary, we use the word for lots of things. That fact alone has
led many to discard Him altogether.
Let us sit together then, and reawaken
love.
Love, at its core, is a desire. It's a
wanting. It's directed a thousand different places, but remains most
simply explained as an intense craving for something.
Consider:
Lust.
Covetousness.
Greed.
Where is the difference?
All can be defined as intense desire.
Obviously one is right, the others,
wrong.
But why?
In any kind of desire, there are two
parties privy to the emotion, the desire-er and the desired.
Does the difference lie in the
substance of the desired?
No, for you can both love and covet the
same woman.
Therefore, the dichotomy would have to
be found in the source of the desire.
In order to find the unique
characteristic that refines desire to love, I submit this question:
How can a person love pepperoni pizza
and love their wife of twenty-five years?
The Christian-ese answer is that there
are different types of love. (Insert inane babble about Greek words
and descend into chaotic pontification)
If the Greeks had multiple words for
different kinds of love, and yet we only have one, have we lost the
fullness of love? Did the Greeks love more than we? Perhaps, but I
think not.
I submit that we only have one word for
love because we need only one word. The carnal appreciation of food,
the camaraderie of a brother, and the intimate connection of a spouse
are simply differing applications and levels of the same desire. All
love.
So there is one love. But what is it?
How can it be defined?
In regards to love, Shakespeare wrote,
“My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep; the more I
give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.”
Now, Shakespeare being a poet, automatically understood all of the finer points of love.
But how could he claim that love increases the more it is given away?
There is a riddle that floats about,
(as riddles do) that asks, “What gets bigger the more you take away
from it?” The answer, being a hole, sheds light on the fact that
some things are in fact the absence of others. The cold dark, for
example, is scientifically just the absence of heated light.
Thus, if love is a desire, and it
increases by giving it another, then love must be an absence of
desire for yourself. Love must be a
desire of a thing to the point where you would give of yourself to
have it.
At
it's basic roots, this is Love. There is much more to it, myriads of
applications, dozens of levels of intensity, and several perversions,
but it remains, innately, a self-sacrificing desire.
Since
love abounds the more it is given, and among the palate of human
emotion, it ranks highly among the causes of happiness, I am lead to
believe the following:
We
should be lovers,
and
that's a fact.