August 15, 2005> 2:08 PM
the power and meaning of love > 3
I remember not long back talking to a friend about this business of loving other people - not even so much "loving" them as recognizing them as legitimate people with just as much right to breathe air and take up space as I do. That sounds easy but I am here to testify that it is not. What I was saying to whoever it was is that, when I take time to sit down and think about it at all, I find it very difficult to conceive of someone existing outside myself as a wholly other being who's life essence does not depend on mine in order for them to survive. Now, add to that the greater dimension of love and loving that other person as a person and you have another story all together. And I'm not talking about emotional sentimentality or feelings of mush or lack thereof toward someone when you look at or think about them. That's a chemical reaction, not love. So, that said, let me allow big Tom to speak here...
The trouble is that love is something quite other than the mere disposition of a subject confronted with an object. In fact, when love is a mere subject-object relationship, it is not real love at all.
...if I love you, I must love you as a person and not as a thing.
To love another as an object is to love him as "a thing," as a commodity which can be used, exploited, enjoyed and then cast off. But to love another as a person we must begin by granting him his own autonomy and identity as a person. We have to love him for what he is in himself, and not for what he is to us. We have to love him for his own good, not for the good we get out of him. And this is impossible unless we are capable of a love which "transforms" us, so to speak, into the other person, making us able to see things as he sees them, love what he loves, experience the deeper realities of his own life as if they were our own.
Hard core. Being transformed into the other person and recognizing their loves and desires as legitimate as your own. That's big business right there. I think there are often times when we believe we are doing this and we are not. We are tolerating one another and not entering into one another. I know this is true of myself. We are ultimately the most important people in our lives. That is, of course, understandable, as we are all broken and not yet recreated. We are still learning what it is to be human. But we are offered opportunities every day to respond to the transformational love of God and we either respond positively or not. When we open ourselves to that Grace, we are changed. When we do not, our potentiality lies dormant.
August 15, 2005
> 2:08 PM
038
