"Love isn't something that we find...."

"Love isn't something
that we find,
it's something that we do...”

Clint Black's 1997 love song,  "Something That We Do"  often comes to me when I am reading the gospels. It always makes me think of Jesus' life. Love wasn't in his words, it was the "how" of his living.

And even though Clint wrote this song about his marriage, it speaks to many paradigms about Love.  Love for our children, those we serve, fellow church members, work colleagues, neighbors, and yes, significant others and spouses.  Even love for our jobs, communities, employers, public servants.

Today, for me, it addresses the lie that love is waiting for the right object for its affections -- in order to fully be itself.  Waiting for the right person or situation to come along.   Or that we have a choice about whether (or not) to love, what to love, when to love, or who to love.  That we have the capacity to assesses something (or someone's) deserving and then we have the right to decide whether to extend affections. Love is not a choice. Love is not a reward to dole out.  This passage from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy is, for me, so clarifying and assuring:

"Life is, always has been,
and ever will be independent
of matter; for Life is God..."

So, you might wonder, how does that related to Love? Well, Love and Life are synonymous [Webster: "one directly implies the other'] So to say that Life is independent of matter, also implies that Love is independent of person, place, or circumstance.

Love -- true Love -- is not dependent on anything. Love is self-existent. Love does not assess deserving, and then choose what it will bestow its affection upon. Just as the sun does not choose what to shine on. Love, like the sun, is impartial about the object of its expression. It loves, because it can do no less. Love that can be stopped, averted, decreased, or managed -- is not Love. It might be a sense of human affection or personal bestowal -- but it is not Love.

Leonard Nimoy once wrote:

"If Love can be withdrawn,
it never was."

I can't think of a truer statement about love.

Now we might -- out of love for someone -- step back from the immediacy of a relationship, and let growth occur, or we might let there be space for deeper listening, self-examination, or a shift in the shape of that love and the role we each play. We might feel Love-led to release someone from a human sense of belonging to us, for a deeper sense of trust in God's appointing and anointing. But make no mistake, Love itself cannot be withdrawn -- it is invariable and eternal. The love that once was, always will be. Love isn't something we control humanly, it is the spiritual power that controls us.

Love isn't waiting for us to find the right person, to manage it as a resource, or control it like a bank account. Love is so much more than a human emotion which we find, fall into, or fight for -- or against. Love is the ultimate power working in us. Moving us into alignment with God's purpose for us.

Love uses us. We don't use Love.  We don't apply it, or decide to repress it.  Love is more powerful than our decisions, aims, or adaptations.  Love is everything.  Or as Mary Baker Eddy tells us in her poem, "Love:"

"Love alone is Life..."

Love is not a choice, it is not a decision, it is not a reward, it is not a gift. Love is the ultimate power of God working in us - governing, guiding, impelling, silencing. Love is the great imperative. It is our Life.

offered with Love,

Cate

"it's holding tight, and letting go..."

"it's holding tight,
and letting go;
it's flying high,
and laying low..."

Clint Black's 1997 hit  "Something That We Do,"  is something of an anthem for me. So much of the success stories we hear - in regard to love, are about holding on. But there was a time in my life when I really needed to hear that love was also about letting go

As a family steeped in adoption, this was a theme in our lives.  The bittersweet paradox of love. For us to be able to be a family, a birth mother -- or birthparents -- had to let go. And yet, I believed that through the path of open adoption -- the ongoing relationship between birth families and adoptive families -- letting go could also include holding on. I still do.

But when it came to marriage, for me it was all about holding on. Holding on for dear life. And this holding on was not always gentle. Sometimes it was frantic and desperate. In fact, it was often like that for me. I would not be a quitter. And I wouldn't let anyone else quit either.

But I have learned that sometimes love is letting go. After decades of refusing to "give up," one day God asked me, "do you love him enough to let him go?" It had never occurred to me that loving someone could mean not trying harder. But as I let that question sink in, I thought about how much I loved my daughters and what loving them had looked like - from the moment they came into our family.  And it was more about letting go, than holding on.

It started with letting go of my dreams of how I would become a mother.  Then it was sharing them with others: placing them in the arms of family and friends who loved them, trusting a babysitter, leaving them in the Children's Room during church services.  Before we knew it, we were dropping them off at pre-school, sports events, sleepovers, camp, international service projects, expeditions, college...

Letting go wasn't about giving up with our daughters, and it wasn't about giving up on my marriage. It was about loving enough to trust God's tender, constant, unfolding care for each of us. I can only speak for myself, but for me, it was about surrendering self-will and pride for spiritual growth and humility. It was about holding on to my highest sense of living love, while letting go of what I thought it should look like.

For those who think that this is some version of self-justification, I can assure you that it is not. I have spent countless nights rehearsing that day -- when after years of trying harder and praying more -- God broke through my self-certainty, with piercing clarity, and asked me to love enough, to let go.

It was not the first time God had spoken to me in this way -- so it wasn't a foreign language. Some years earlier, when my husband and I were in the process of adopting our first child -- a son -- his birthmother was prayerfully led to reconsider her decision to surrender. Our adoption agency had made it clear that since he was already in our home, we could contest her change of heart.

But that was the thing -- it was all about hearts. The night before she was to give us all her final decision, I was sitting alone praying about what to do.  And out-of-the-blue God asked me, "Some day that baby will be a boy of twelve. Will you be able to say to him, "your mother wanted to raise you, but we fought to keep you."

My heart surrendered in a moment. And as painfully hard as it was, I never regretted that surrender. Years later, the Voice, and the feeling, were the same -- and I knew. I felt it pierce all the disappointment and pride. All the human will and hardness. I knew it had nothing to do with not loving him -- but loving him more.

Mary Baker Eddy has this to say in her primary work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:

"The sharp experiences of belief in the supposititious life of matter, as well as our disappointments and ceaseless woes, turn us like tired children to the arms of divine Love. Then we begin to learn life in divine Science. Without this process of weaning, "Canst thou by searching find out God?"

For me it read, "Then we begin to learn love in divine Science. Each time I have been asked to let go, my understanding of Love has expanded beyond anything I could have ever imagined.  I have learned more about love, and my relationship to God -- the Source of all love -- by the weaning, more than by the holding on.

And in truth, we never really let go of what we love - only of our sense of personal attachment and possession. We are not the arbiters of love in our lives -- of its presence in our hearts. We love, who and what we love by divine appointment. We can't control that. But we can let God define how we relate to one another, moment-by-moment.

Love is a verb. Nothing can keep us from being love. Nothing can deprive us of our right to love.  It is the one real power we have. Think of it.  No one can stop you from loving them -- from being conscious of, seeing, and calling attention to the best in them. Every relationship in our lives is the ebb and  flow of holding on to what is true about another -- and letting go of what isn't.

Whether it is in the day-to-day surrender of our children to teachers and friendships, or the letting go of what we think define us, and how we live, love, and work together. We are never separated from those we love. We hold them forever in our hearts - as tenderly remembered experiences, through co-parenting, and in our genuine hopes for their future joy in loving -- and perhaps, loving someone new. In this way, there really is no separation, only the surrender of outlines and attachments.

Letting go in love is not a failure. It is just another way of loving someone. Every moment of loving is a remarkable moment of success over self. In this, there is no failed love. Time doesn't validate love. Loving validates love.

I love these lyrics from "Something That We Do":

"We help to make each other
all that we can be.

Though we can find
our strength and inspiration
independently.

The way we work together
is what sets our love apart."

Life is eternal. There will be an infinite number of loves in our lives. May each one bring you nearer to God - the Source of all love. May you know the eternity of loving without possession or attachment. May you feel the power of love as an active, unstoppable, irresistible verb. May you know the love that is both holding tight, and letting go.


offered with Love,

Kate

[photo by Katariina Agnes Fagering - used with permission]

"Love isn't someplace that we fall..."

"...Love is wide, love is long
Love is deep and love is strong
Love is why I love this song
And I hope you love it too

There's no request too big or small --
We give ourselves, we give our all,
Love isn't someplace that we fall,
It's something that we do..."

I've been considering some of the love-lessons I've been blessed by over the last few years, and the paradigm shift takes my breath away. 

Clint Black's "Something that We Do" speaks very specifically to marital love, but I believe...with my whole being...that these same principles apply across the board.

Whether we are loving our children, our friends, our global neighbors, or...as Jesus expected...our enemies, this love that moves beyond mere human feeling, is universal.  To be divine, this kind of love must be lived. It is a way of behaving, a deep humanity...that, when lived without question...reveals our divinity.

Yes, the love we "fall into" is often exciting, comforting, joyous, breath-taking, and overwhelmingly wonderful...but if that love isn't, also, consistent, universal, impartial, unconditional, and sustainable, it falls short of the love that redeems and saves.  Mary Baker Eddy has this to say about the strong demands of Love, and on loving:

"Love is not something put upon a shelf, to be taken down on rare occasions with sugar-tongs and laid on a rose-leaf. I make strong demands on love, call for active witnesses to prove it, and noble sacrifices and grand achievements as its results. Unless these appear, I cast aside the word as a sham and counterfeit, having no ring of the true metal.

Love cannot be a mere abstraction, or goodness without activity and power. As a human quality, the glorious significance of affection is more than words: it is the tender, unselfish deed done in secret; the silent, ceaseless prayer; the self-forgetful heart that overflows; the veiled form stealing on an errand of mercy, out of a side door; the little feet tripping along the sidewalk; the gentle hand opening the door that turns toward want and woe, sickness and sorrow, and thus lighting the dark places of earth."

It is this kind of love that transforms the lover...and the loved.  And it is this kind of love...the act of loving well beyond the conditions that our own hearts place upon our loving...flying in the face of the"thus far, and no farther" kind of love...that change us into the image of Him that "loveth us first".

This loving that has its source in Him, in God, often makes no sense to human reason. It can be found in the heart of a birthmother who makes an adoption plan for a child (or children) she would lay her life down for. It can be found in the catacombs of a divorce court when parents put aside hurt and anger because, at the very root...much deeper than the froth and foam of emotions...lies a shared love for children they adore, and the marriage that gave those children their earliest moments of tenderness and devotion. It can be found in homeless shelters where strangers serve, and on battlefields, when enemies embrace.

William Blake wrote:

"Love seeketh not itself to please,
nor for itself hath any care,
but for another gives its ease,
and builds a heaven in hell's despair."

In our sorrow and despair, in our tears and through our terror...right there, right in the darkness of the "valley of the shadow of death" - the place where all that threatens our hopes and our dreams darkens our path...comes the opportunity to love without condition...without reason.  This unconditional love is the love that passeth all understanding. It goes beyond the boundaries of romantic love, beyond the breadth of maternal love, beyond everything that, we think, we need, or want...it is the Love that is Infinite in scope..and echoes eternally. It isn't someone we find, somewhere we fall, sometime when we were happy. It's something that we do.

with Love,
Kate
Kate Robertson, CS

[photo credit: Nathaniel Wilder 2010]