The word “love” has many meanings. Erotic love is based on chemistry, attraction. Friendship is based upon mutual interest. Agape is based upon compassion. The love one feels toward one’s child is emotion, desire to protect… …] Love has lots and lots of facets. The trouble is that there is only one word for all these different kinds, so it is easy to play hide and seek.
In bold: Exactly. There are so many “situations” and “feelings” that we call “love”, that we often confuse which love we are talking about. Which is why your footnote makes no sense: you try to compare one thing that YOU call love, to the thing WE call love. In simpler words, you are comparing a flower to a tree.
Now I am getting completely off-topic. Hopefully for the last time (if you’d like to discuss love, we can start another topic).
Let’s give color to these loves. This is our color/botanic guide:
Red: This is the fruit. The eros. It is what people feel for others. This is what scientists often try to pin down, using hormonal levels to define it, but never truly understand how deep it is. Dopamine, adrenaline, serotonin, oxytocin - this is what we “feel” when “in love”. It is a feeling that makes people happy, feel good about themselves and their loved ones.** It is what move people together**. For Christians, this is what moves us towards creating new life - like a fruit, it is full of seeds, just waiting to be cared for to sprout a new plant. It is also delicious, moving us into wanting to produce fruits.
Pink: This is the flower. The philia. Your definition hurts a little, as it is
NOT based upon mutual interest. Anyway. It is about giving and caring about someone else, with no strings attached. You don’t help your friend just so they can owe you one. You don’t do it out of obligation either. You do it because you sincerely want to help them. It is beneficial to both parties. Like the flowers, this is the beauty we see coming from **love **. It is there to be appreciated, to make us feel good about the tree, to bring about insects and other animals and possibly be pollinated into something new.
Blue: This is the tree, the trunk. This is our “agape”. God’s love for us and ours for Him, and the source of all “true love” out there. This is the pure essence of love. This is
Charity. This is the roots deep under the ground, the phloem that transports water, sap and sugar to keep the **love ** alive, to make the flowers bloom, to make the fruits grow.
A tree does not take benefit to **itself **in forming flowers and fruits. In fact, it uses up energy.
This love is often painful, full of suffering. It is about giving up self.
Sacrifice. This is something beautiful and life-giving, but covered in bark, hidden by the soil.
You help someone because that’s what love compels you to do - you help homeless, who’ll never be able to pay you back, out of love. You are kind to your enemies, who you deeply dislike, but who you love either way.
It’s what a mother **DOES **for her children: giving up her free time, her body, her desires, her ambitions, just to see them well. What a husband does: giving up his time, his youth, his money, to care for a wife and their children.
And like the tree, this love doesn’t concern itself with pleasure in someone else’s presence, doesn’t care about one’s own happiness. The tree stays ugly, to make her branches beautiful. When I stay with patients, ill, dying and angry, I don’t feel good in their presence. But I stay with them, for their sake, for their well-being. To make them comfortable, to make them happy. Even though the flowers will wilt, and the fruits will fall, and nothing will be given back to the tree. Still, I care. A mother cares. For them.
**Friendship **is what happens when **love ** works out in the end, bringing people together, making enemies turn into friends. Romance is what happens when friends, already moved by their **love **, decide to mutually love one another, and bring more into their lives.
Eventually, the fruits will fall. The seeds will germinate. A new **love ** will come about. The first tree will get stronger, the more trees that come about. Just like any forest, its roots will dig deeper, it’s trunk will grow stronger. More and more it will grow. We see God’s love pour on us; we, in turn, make that love produce more and more love. For His pleasure in seeing a forest rise from our small grove.
And you are trying to compare, in your footnote, this **love **with that
love. You are trying to accuse us of praising love, while denying love.
We deny “love”, yes. We deny the seedless fruits, the same way we deny the ugly flowers, as those will never be more than they already are, as those will never bring more to the forest we are trying to build.
Now, as true businessmen, we praise seedless fruits (easier to eat, just as delicious). We also praise fruits with seeds, but because it is fruit, not because it has seeds. Now, we buy fruits without seeds; we eat fruits and spit the seeds in the garbage. We are not helping the forest grow; we are just helping ourselves to what it offers.
The grove - with the trees full of bark - is the central theme of Christianity. And we label the seedless fruits as an evil invention, as it goes completely against what we are for; as it distorts what the grove IS about.
Today, people think the tree is about the delicious fruits and beautiful flowers. For us, the fruits, the flowers, everything in the grove is still about the tree.
Or consider that the brain is kept alive, but the rest of the body is discarded? Roald Dahl had a great short story along these lines, the title was: “William and Mary”.
