What is Love?

What is Love?

Love that majesty of the divine can take many forms. You can place it in your hearts and your minds and give it power over all things. It is the great shield and guardian against the forces of hate and malice. Its beauty is its understanding and tolerance; its greatness is its wisdom and forgiveness. Many do not see the power they have and subsequently rebel against the love they have inside themselves being fearful that it might show them up for being weak. Love is not weakness it is strength unimagined.
To many love is a relationship between two partners, between parents and children between those that are nearest and dearest. It can take different forms manifesting itself in a love for even an object, a smell, a desire. It makes the inanimate seem real and the real seem inanimate. It can give distance to the living and life to the dead.
To some love is clean living, showing the world that they are right, decent, law abiding citizens whose cold testimony inflicts upon the less fortunate the harshest of judgments, and feel satisfied after they have done so, that they are blameless in their condemnation of others and that all punishments are well deserved. They do not understand that love is about mercy unless they require mercy for themselves, as they are like great storehouses of virtue and love who give to their own but are unwilling to share what they have got with those who are considered strangers and do not realise that in those storehouses something rotten festers; hypocrisy.
To others love is highly possessive and uncompromising; it shows itself in a selfish need to be recognised by those loved, so much so that people are caught in a web of seeking the approval of those loved by elevating and placing them on pedestals so that all wrong they do goes unrecognised and unnoticed. Such a love manifests itself not just in the individual but also in groups and even sections of communities, and religions.
So again the question is what is Love? And how does anyone explain what has never been understood. When the riots occurred in 2011, a certain group showed how they had reached their tipping point. People lost businesses and homes and those with the authority to act looked at what had occurred with the answer of condemnation and punishment. Even though this does not address the underlying problems of those of the weak, the vulnerable and the unfortunate. Those people that had committed such offences needed to be re-educated. Some people even statesmen believed that the hostility of such groups that participated in the riots were due to a few opportunists; such a simplistic view does not consider why such people become opportunistic.
Those that perpetrated the riots did so not because they believed the world owed them something but because they felt they owed the world for all the hate, malice and callousness they have been forced to swallow. The bitterness is culturally held in their memory over many decades. It is in their hearts and their homes, it might even be brought from other places and be passed down from generation to generation. The understanding of this takes empathy, courage and a wisdom that is slowly but guardedly being shown.
So again the question is what is love and how does one explain its great mystery. I wrote in my social theory how the weak and vulnerable prey on the weak and vulnerable and this was seen in the riots. In a recent blog I also wrote how the rich treated each other richly and the poor treated each other poorly; I spoke of the richness of spirit and how it spans all classes as does the poor of spirit. For callousness like love does not know borders or bow to class.
That is why true understanding and education is necessary. People need to be taught empathy; the way to do that is through example and instruction. People learn by association and by things they are already sympathetic to, that is how they may be taught.

Ask yourself who or what do you Love? And then ask yourselves is that love or is it something else?

Adam David Papa-Adams (C) 2012 all rights reserved