Love.
What is it? We all know what love is well enough to describe it, but poorly enough to entertain dozens of attempted definitions. Our culture--indeed, human-kind--obsesses over love. Just go to a reading session for modern teenage poetry and 80% of the poems will either be about love or death (which is a whole other topic that we understand and yet don't understand, and thus obsess about). What about all the other emotions humans undergo? What about hunger, or pain, or confusion, or boredom? These aren't under dispute, apparently--only love and death. Hundreds of songs, and thousands of poems, have somewhere in them said, "love is____" and then followed up with a simile, a metaphor, a lie, an excuse. But rarely a definition. One of the difficulties in defining love is it has so many meanings. The Greeks (and C.S. Lewis, but he got the idea from the Greeks) had four separate words that are all translated into English as "love". So let's examine them and see if we can narrow our focus . . . "Storge" was the Greek word for love as in "I love cake," or "I love my dog Fluffy." It means affection due to familiarity and can thus be best understood as "like." I think this emotion is well-enough understood we can pass it by. "Philia" was used to describe friendship. Here we strike more fertile ground. Friendship, brotherhood, camaraderie--our culture gives some lyric and screen time to exploring this healthy, vibrant emotion. Look at Boromir's last words to Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings for example. But once again I sense no great confusion over the implications of this meaning of love. It is simple, organic, vibrant, giving way to courage and trust and connection. "Agape," means charity, and after Paul the Apostle was through, I have sensed no need for further exploration. "Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth." That about sums it up. And that leaves "Eros," the romantic love, the love we find so difficult to define, the love we spend hours writing poetry about. What is it? We don't know, for certain. A boy reaches the age of twelve or so and suddenly he gets shaky knees whenever she walks by. A girl age sixteen cares so much about him that she plans for hours how to drop subtle clues to make him ask her on a date. A man age twenty-one will write a girl for eighteen months, waiting patiently for her without ever seeing her once in that time period. What is this powerful emotion? Why do certain members of the opposite gender illicit this feeling in us when the majority do not? Can we control it? Should we control it? Why does it affect our behavior so drastically? Is it the greatest of human emotions? Or is it like a powerful drug, deluding our sense of reason and objectivity? I'll let the poets answer these questions. Or maybe I'll tackle them in a later post. But right now I'm going to bed so that I can develop good sleep habits so that I can be more successful and productive and thus be a better husband one day for the girl I have probably not met yet but that I know I will love more than the whole world, because if the love I have had for certain individuals is only a foretaste, a prelude of the overwhelming joy to come, then O! How joyful will be that eventually wedding day! Love is a motivator.
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