All You Need Is Love??

Erotic Love
Eros is one of the two major gods that Westerners worship. This is as true of people who think of themselves as good Christians as it is among heathens. Finding and/or losing love is a predominant concern for many young people and also people of all ages, and a common theme of popular music, television and movies. The other god is Mammon. Making and spending money preoccupies the majority of most people’s time. Agape and Charity run a distant second to Eros and Mammon.

My intention in this article is to move towards a naturalistic equivalent of the Christian concepts of agape and charity, but before I get to that, I’ll say a few words about erotic love (I’m writing this on Valentine’s Day). In a previous post, I wrote:

…we can see why erotic love is so highly valued. In the presence of our beloved we experience the joy of shared love, delight in the loved one’s beauty, the happiness of being in his or her company, the pleasure of eating and drinking together and of sex, which is probably the most intense form of pleasure. While it lasts, erotic love is the complete deal.(1)

While it lasts!!! I remember listening to pop music on my transistor radio (this was back in the sixties), and all the promises that “our love will never die,” then listening to the Country station where it was all cheatin’ hearts and divorce. Pop culture isn’t so naive anymore, but the joy of love and sorrow at its loss is still very much present.  

In the article quoted above, I went on to say: 

The ascent of love I mentioned above requires something of a movement from the intoxication of erotic love to the more sober, disciplined forms of love that come with such things as raising a family and trying to improve one’s community.

“Sober love” is not a topic that makes for a great love song or movie, but ultimately it is the kind of love that can result in an enduring marriage (my wife and I celebrated our 46th anniversary last month, so I know a bit about enduring a marriage:-).

Being Valentine’s Day let me add this to your box of chocolates. For all the exultation Western culture has given erotic love, behind it is the same kind of genetic impulse that pushes all other forms of life to reproduce. In love, we are Nature’s puppets. We fall in love for much the same reason that dogs go into heat. We find our loved one beautiful, because Nature has molded us to see that way. As cultural beings, we have developed fancy ideas to cover the biological basis of love, or to put it metaphorically, we have fitted our naked instincts into fine clothing. 

But nonetheless, such love is also the complete deal.

Caring
There are many kinds of love, both in terms of the object of our love and the particular quality of our emotion. We can love our parents, siblings, children, friends, and neighbors. We can love our city, state or country; we can love places; we certainly can love our pets; we can love art works, ideas, ideals. 

The philosopher Martin Heidegger called caring the essence of our being. I have contemplated that idea often and have found no reason to disagree with it. Love is a deep form of caring, so following Heidegger’s logic, love is also of the essence of our being, the depth of our being. If you want to understand other people, a good place to start is by learning what they really care about, what they love. 

In this respect, it is also worthwhile to think about what we really care about. Is what we care most about really worthy of so attention? But then caring and love can be irrational. I care about some things that rationally I really would prefer to not care about. I care about my local NBA team and I don’t really know why. I don’t really like basketball much and the team’s been an endless source of disappointment.

But to some extent we can be rational about our caring and it is worthwhile to cultivate that degree of rationality about how we care and what we care about, how and what we love.

Spiritual Love
I have a favorite place to hike. On one side is the Mississippi River on the other the tracks of three major railroads (BNSF, Canadian Pacific and Union Pacific). As I was walking yesterday, a railcar went by where some graffitist had painted “God hates every one of us” in large letters. I had to laugh. From a purely empirical standpoint, that statement rings truer than the idea that God is love and loves us all. 

To the best of my knowledge, Jesus never said that God loves us. He did, most certainly, exhort people to love God. The Gospel of Matthew reports that Jesus said: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. That’s not a bad basis for a religion. Too bad more Christians don’t try to live up to it.

I’m sure it is easier to love a God conceived anthropomorphically, than to love God as conceived as the mysterious ultimate source of this vast, ancient, wild universe. The source of cute baby animals, yes, but also of several million species of insects, arachnids, parasites, viruses and the like. I have read that there are actually parasites of parasites that also have parasites. Not so easy to love a God with such an obsessive fondness for creepy crawlies and parasites.

And yet I think we can, I know I can, love this wildly fascinating Universe, where the created and creator are one and the same. I would go so far as suggesting that such a love should be an ideal for spiritual naturalism. 

As far as loving one’s neighbor as we love ourselves, well, perhaps some people can, but I can’t. To love another in any meaningful way requires that we commit a bit of our soul to that person. My soul isn’t large enough to love a large number of people. I prefer to love a few people deeply, soulfully. I find however, that I can feel compassion for not only all people but for all living creatures. Compassion does not require “a piece of my heart” (to quote an old Janis Joplin song). Compassion is my soul recognizing its commonality with my fellow creatures. That recognition takes nothing from my soul but rather expands it. 

So love of the Creator/Creation and compassion for all sentient beings is my naturalist equivalent of the saying from the Gospel of Matthew. But in addition I would say there is wisdom in living from the center of our caring, the center of our love, and in making that center an anchor amidst the changing tides of life.

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Notes:

1. From Spiritual Hedonism and Beyond, April 10, 2017