Comments?
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Mr M
17 years ago"Throughout history, humanity has tried to answer the ageless question of what love is. In fact, no other subject has been written more about in literature than love. Just what has it meant to they whom have sought to find and experience it for themselves? As I have observed, some have found it elusive, some have found it both challenging and rewarding while others simply have found it as their sole reason to exist. However, some have had the poor form to confuse it with sexuality and have only based its worth upon the hedonistic and narrow vision of the sexual experience. Though this is called "making love", it really isn't since love is not something we have a power to make but only respond to, nurture and give in return. In addition, there are those who are not motivated by love at all but by other things considering it completely meaningless or at best, just another biological function that is no different from walking or sleeping. Like I said, a narrow vision.
The bible teaches that love is not rude, proud or unkind and that it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things and never fails. Yet, while the bible speaks of spiritual love from God to His people and of His people towards one another, God also said that it is not good for man to be alone and it is upon these values we should base all of our relationships. Shakespeare believed that "love alters not with its brief hours and weeks but bears it out even to the edge of doom..." while Euripides said it differently when he claimed, "He is not a lover who does not love forever." I agree with all of these things but I think that I like the thought that Ranier Maria Rilke gave us on it best: "For one human being to love another is perhaps the most difficult task of all, the epitome, the ultimate test."
I do not purport to know the answer to what love really is. I am simply a man on the same journey as everyone else in the hope that someday I, too, will find it. What I have learned for myself, and offer here, is that love exists as a standard that never acquiesces. It cannot be changed into what we want it to be because it is unchangeable. Nor is it something we can ever fit into a container limited by our own perceptions because it is unlimited in what it is. In fact, it is so much larger than we are and its truth is a truth we must find for ourselves within the breath of our experiences. Moreover, it is meant to grow inside each of us until we perceive an understanding of it that lets it take our lives in whatever direction it will. Indeed, we are the ones who must be conformed to fit within its box or it fades into oblivion and is lost. In my own experience, it has given me a profound beauty that I have sought to give to others in return. I do not believe that we can ever measure the depth of what love really is but rather, as William Sloane Coffin wrote,"It is love that measures our stature."
In truth, love is the test by which the measure of our existence is made and the value of our worth determined..."
from the Foreword of "From Time to Time" -
