Love is a Doing Word

in being half way through a book that talks about love and relationships, and having just finished one talking about love and lust, and having based my life around it, i begin to think. what is love? truly and honestly, what is it?

the dictionary defines love as the following.

"An intense feeling of affection and care towards another person."

would you think this to be a fair interpretation of the one thing that this world is moulded around (or should be, lord knows its certainly a missing factor in todays world), the one thing that can cause so much pain to someone because they supposedly 'fell in love' why do we say we 'fell' as if we couldn't control the feeling, this terminology seems quite ludacris to myself. we excuse things for the sake of love, 'why did you leave her?' 'because i was in love with her and it was the only way to protect her', every religion talks about it, whether from the positive spectrum or not, all beliefs are based around it and all deeds are done through it.

it has become conclusive to me that love is more than meets the eye, more than our minds can comprehend, more than our world could ever offer. Massive Attack describe love as a 'doing word' in their song, teardrop more lyrics from this describe love as the 'teardrop on the fire' of the world, what damage would a drop of water have to a blazing fire? none, why is it this way today?
C.S lewis wrote a book on it called "The Four Loves" i have yet to read it but its based on the four loves of our world which are as follows

* 1 Affection
* 2 Friendship
* 3 Eros
* 4 Caritas

the former two are obvious and self explanatry but the latter two are probably rare words to us so let me elaborate,

Eros (έρως) is love in the sense of 'being in love'. This is distinct from sexuality, which Lewis calls Venus. so in this character of love it is defined as being in love, which relates to 'falling in love' which implies a marriage or long term partnership to us

Caritas (agapē, αγαπη) is an unconditional love directed towards one's neighbor which is not dependent on any lovable qualities that the object of love possesses. from wikipedia that is a complex sentence so let us break that down to laymans terms. A loves B but independantly of the lovable qualities of B, so essentially we get to the religious side of things for the only one we know to love like this would be god.

so here we have three basic loves that are earthly and the last being supernatural. it would appear logically to me that the former three are striving and attaining to be like the 4th, but failing incomaprably to do so. shakespeare himself has written the vast majority of his works around the idea of love, i once read a poem of his (very long i may add) that describes the love between a turtle and a phoenix, as odd as this sounds shakespeare puts it well in this poem

"Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together;
To themselves yet either-neither,
Simple were so well compounded

That it cried how true a twain
Seemeth this concordant one!
Love hath reason, reason none
If what parts can so remain"

there is no reason in love, love knows no standards and it strikes wherever the connection occurs. its brings the divided together, its puts together the broken piece and it is full of twisted truths, yet at the end of it, when we find it. it appears so simple "Simple were so well compounded" to us that love may occur, how did we miss it beforehand, it was right in front of us how did we not grasp it?

let me back this up with some scripture, a piece that i love (funny that)

"Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant,

5does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered,

6does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth;

7bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8Love never fails; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away. "

love, to us is something we characterise, something we try to put into perspective, a concept that has blown our minds until we learned to define and refine. yet here god tells us that love has no characteristics, it's simply love. it does not fear, does not hold grudges and does not have fovourites, its simple love. no one can take love away and no-one has more right to it than any other person, it simply loves. we cannot justify love and we cannot refuse to recieve it, it simply loves.

Switchfoot wrote 'look what a mess we've made of love' what is he comparing todays love to? being a christian himself does he mean god's love? how can we mess up love? it simply loves.

i think the only power we have over love is the choice to use it or not, we can withhold it from people, from this decision the love in the air is shortened, its choked and starved, we need love to survive. its been proven that without human contact babie's die within 5 weeks of birth, it is wired into us to interact, to hurt, to speak, to care and to love.

Black Eyed Peas in their first and very succesful single 'where is the love' said this

"And if you hatin you're bound to get irate
Yeah madness is what you demonstrate
And that's exactly how anger works and operates
You gotta have love just to set it straight
Take control of your mind and meditate
Let your soul gravitate to the love y'all"

here we see that if 'you hatin' then you are bound to go mad, hate only produces negativity, bitterness, anger and a selfish attitude, we need to love to stabilize this, 'you gotta have love to set it straight' how can we properly function in life with all this hate and anger around us, here it tells us to take control of our mind, do not let it slip and become angry at the small things, control yourself after all we do brag about it being 'our life' so how can you give in so easily to the bitterness and aggression of life, when we can put oursleves higher than that and 'let your soul gravitate to the love' two wrongs don't make a right, its so commonly said but do we mean it, do we see the philosophy behind such a statement?

Bob marley was due to perform one day on a public stage but was shot in the shoulder the day before it, we walked out of the hospital that day and went straight to the stage, someone stopped him and asked 'Bob, you shouldn't do this mon, you need rest' he replied with 'the bad people in this world won't rest till they see us collapse so how can we rest today and let them get what they want', i love Bob's music it demonstrates such love and passion in music that we ought to be striving for these days. then of course there is the famour 'god is love' statement, we have all heard it and i have put my own twist to it in an earlier post last year, but do we really know the signifigance of such a statement, essentially it works both ways, love is god and god in himself is love.

love is such a privelage, such a godly desire, we all yearn to be loved, really its all we truly want in life, love is the basis of our existence, the basis of all religion and the basis of our lives for if our parents didn't love us chances are you wouldn't be alive to read this here and now. how will you show love in your life? will you research it and have a humble understanding of it? or will you be like the multiple person's i have known and fall in love with the concept of love itself.

Limp Bizkut wrote in their song 'Lonely World'

"It's like love, some people get it
For some it's just a glove that just never fitted
For me it's just a pain in the ass
But i'm addicted to the taste of hopin' it could last"

for some love is fortunate nad in their favour, they have a good life and find thier soulmate first pop, no worries, they are set, for others its the glove that never fitted, that math's equation that was always too hard or that DIY job they simply couldn't be bothered with, for most it is that 'pain in the ass' but we are all addicted to it, all addicted to the vast reward it gives us when we finally conquer it. the day we find true love we find in ourselves something we have never seen before suddenly and finally we see ourselves giving all for the one we love, we find ourselves constantly think of the person, we become paranoid when they are five minutes late home from work, we fear for their safety and want to do all we can to protect them in life.

may we all find this love one day, and may we all live a life of love, love that shows who we are, love that will brighten someones day, love that could put a smile to the face of someone who might be planning suicide. love that builds character and inspires us to follow our dreams.

Dan