Love is not just something that happens to you: it is a certain special way of living and being alive.
Love is an intensification of life, a completeness, a fullness, a wholeness of life. We do not live merely in order to safely vegetate through our days until we die. Nor do we live merely in order to take part in the routines of work and amusement that go on around us.
We are not just machines to be cared for and driven safely until they run down.
In other words, life is not a straight horizontal line—or the safest and shortest distance—between two points, birth and death.
Rather, life curves upward—or can—to peaks and plateaus of intensity, to higher points and regions of meaning and value, where all of a person’s latent creative possibilities are called into action and the person transcends him- or herself in encounter, response, and communion with another human being.
And it is for this communion and self-transcendence that we came into the world.
We do not become fully human until we give ourselves to another in love.
Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone—we find it with another. We do not discover the secret of our lives merely by study and calculation in our own safe and isolated meditations. The meaning of life has to be revealed to us in love, by the one we love.
And if this love is unreal, then the secret will not be found, the meaning will never reveal itself, the message will never be decoded. At best, we will receive a scrambled and partial message, one that will deceive and confuse us.
We will never be fully real to ourselves or another until we let ourselves fall fully in love—either with another human being or with God.
Our attitude to life invariably is also going to be, in one way or another, our attitude toward love.
Our conception of ourselves is bound to be profoundly affected by our conception—and our experience—of love.
And our love—or our lack of it—our willingness to risk it, or our determination to play it safe and avoid it, will be an endless expression of ourselves: of who we think we are, of what we want to be, of what we think we are here for.
This will not be something that merely goes on in our head. Our attitude toward love and toward life affects our entire life.
And genuine love is a personal revolution—it transforms our entire life. Real love takes your ideas, your desires, and your actions and welds them together in one experience and one living reality which is a new you.
And you may prefer to keep this from happening.
You may prefer to keep your thoughts and desires and acts in separate compartments, but if you do so then you will be an artificial and divided person, and such a life and way of living will not make sense, and is not likely to be happy or healthy.
Most of us do not consciously reflect and contemplate on what love is and is not. Instead, we consciously or unconsciously tailor our notions of love according to the patterns we are exposed to day after day in movies, TV, music, advertising, and in our reading.
And one of the most prevailing ready-made attitudes or approaches toward life and love in our culture is what might be called the “package” concept of love.
In it love is regarded as a deal. In order to make a deal you have to appear in the marketplace with a worthwhile product or self—or if the product that you are doesn’t seem worth very much, then you can dress it up in a good-looking package (Chris Rock’s “representative”). Thus we unconsciously consider ourselves and others to be objects for sale on the market. We want to be wanted, we want to be needed, we want to be desired, we want to attract potential customers, we want to look like the type of product that makes money, has curb appeal, et cetera. Hence, we waste a great deal of time and life modeling ourselves on the images presented to us by our affluent marketing society.
And in doing this we come to consider ourselves and others not as persons but as products—as “goods,” as “packages.” We commodify each other and appraise each other commercially. We size each other up and make deals with a view to our own profit, benefit, and security. We do not give ourselves in love: instead we make a deal that will enhance our own product or standing or security.
The long word for all of this is narcissism. And psychologists have had some pretty rough things to say about the immaturity and narcissism of our love in our marketing society.
The moment one approaches love in terms of “need” and “fulfillment,” love has to be a deal. And what’s worse is that since we are constantly subjected to the saturation bombing of our souls and senses and imagination with suggestions of perfection, more ideal fulfillments, better forms of psychological security and gratification, we almost cannot help but be acommittal and constantly revising our estimate of the deal we have made. We seem to be unable to help ourselves from going back on our word and seeking to make a “better” deal with someone else who is more satisfying, in tact, alluring, secure, beneficial to us.
The trouble with this commercialized idea of love is that it diverts our attention more and more from the essentials of love to the accessories or periphery of love. You are no longer able to really love the other person, because you become obsessed with your own standing, security, and advancement—you become obsessed with the efficacy of your own and the other’s package, your own and the other’s product, your own and the other’s market value.
And this is not love. What this is is narcissistic; and it’s dehumanizing.
The truth is that this whole “package” concept of life and love and is self-defeating; it actually undermines the development of real love. To consider love merely as a matter of need and fulfillment, as something which works itself out in a cool and calculating deal, is to miss the whole point of love—and of life itself.
To regard love as merely a need to be fulfilled, as something to get, reflects and immature and regressive and stunted view of life and other people.
The plain truth is that love is not a matter of getting, and certainly not a matter of always getting what you want. Quite the contrary. The insistence on always having what you want, on always being happy and satisfied and secure, on always being fulfilled, makes love impossible. To love you have to climb out of the cradle where everything is “getting,” and grow up to the maturity of giving, and without nearly as much concern for getting anything special in return. Love is not a deal, it is often self-sacrifice. Love is not marketing, it is a form of worship, reverence, appreciation, and gratitude.
In reality, love is a positive force, a transcendent spiritual power or motivation. It is, in fact, the deepest creative and courageous power in human nature. Love flowers spiritually in response to a deep encounter with another person. It is a living appreciation of life as value and as a gift. Love has its own wisdom, its own science, its own art, its own way of exploring the inner depths of life in the mystery of the loved person. Love knows, understands, and meets the demands of life insofar as it responds with warmth, abandon, surrender.
When people truly love each other, they experience far more than just a mutual need for each other’s company and consolation. In—or through and because of—their relationship with each other they become different people: they become more than their everyday selves; they become more alive, more understanding, more abiding, more enduring, more patient, more courageous. They become better people. They are made over into new beings. They are transformed by the power of their love.
Love is the revelation of our deepest person potential and meaning and value and identity.
But this revelation or revealing remains impossible as long as we are the prisoner to our own egoism and fears.
I simply cannot find myself in myself: only in another. My true meaning and worth are shown to me not by my own estimate of myself, but in the eyes of the one who loves me; the one who loves me as I am, with my faults and limitations, revealing to me the truth that even these faults and limitations cannot destroy my worth in their eyes; that I am therefore still valuable and lovable as a person in spite of my shortcomings, in spite of the imperfections of my exterior “package.”
As we deepen in love, the package becomes less and less important until it becomes unimportant altogether. What matters is this infinitely precious message which we can discover only in our love for another person.
This mutual revelation of two persons in their deepest secret is something entirely private. And it cannot be communicated to anyone else until it is embodied in the child who becomes, as it were, a living word, a physical manifestation of their shared secret.
Love is a transforming and redeeming power of almost mystical intensity which endows the lovers with qualities and capacities they never dreamed they could embody.
Where do these qualities come from?
From the enhancement of life itself, deepened, intensified, elevated, strengthened, and spiritualized by love. Love is not only a special way of being alive, it is the perfection of life. He who loves is more alive and more real than he was when he did not love.
That is perhaps one of the reasons why love seems dangerous: the lover finds in himself too many new powers, too many new insights. Life looks completely different to him, all his values change. What seemed worthwhile before has become trivial; what seemed impossible before has become effortless and easy. When a person is undergoing that kind of inner cataclysm, anything might happen. And thank God, it does happen! The world would not be worth much if it didn’t.
The power of genuine love is so deep and so strong that it cannot be deflected from its true aim even by the silliest of wrong ideas. When love is alive and mature in a person, it does not matter if the person has a false idea of himself and of life: love will guide him according to its own inner truth and will correct his ideas in spite of himself.
The trouble, however, is that our wrong ideas may prevent love from growing and maturing in our lives.
Once we love, our love can change our thinking. But until then, wrong thinking can inhibit love.
Abridged and adapted and modified from “Love and Need: Is Love a Package or a Message?” by Thomas Merton, from his book “Love and Living,” pp. 25-37—
