Love’s Manifesto
Love is an openness to, a curiosity about, to desire to know better, to be connected to, to know in depth—a positive expectancy towards the object of love.
Love is not assumptions and expectations about who someone else is. Love is allowing another to be who they are. Love is not manipulative or forcing another to change. Love embraces all it sees—the good, the bad and the ugly in each of us.
Love flows freely to everyone or not at all. We are consistent: if we love our close family and ourselves only partially, then that is how we love everyone. If we are loving and forgiving towards some, we are loving and forgiving towards all. How loving are you? Have you noticed how consistent you are? Do you love yourself? All of yourself?
The corollary: one cannot love this person and not the next one. We are partial people who love a little or whole people who love everyone. Love does not choose whom it loves, it flows freely out to everyone.
Love is not partial, eliminating some from its list and only expending itself on some—that is not love. Love does not say that it loves someone, but doesn’t necessarily like him. Love loves, period.
God’s love challenges us to be whole, loving people who forgive forgive ourselves and others, who allow ourselves to be converted into lovers of all creation, all creatures.
Love sets no conditions under which it will operate. Love does not reject anyone. Love sees everyone in its sight as worthy of love.
There is no fear, no hate in a person who loves.
The ability to love like God loves has to be perfected, made whole in us.
God’s love is the bedrock on which our lives are to stand. To stand on the bedrock of love means that one has to give up his/her own personal expectations, judgments, and preferences in order to see another as God sees them. When we stand in God’s love and love enters into us there is nothing we can do but love every single person we encounter.
To love God is to love freely and wholly the creation and every single thing and person God created therein.
Love is the whole reason for us to be on this planet, Earth is the training ground for love. Can we love under this circumstance or that? Can we love when we are suffering? Can we love when everything is going perfectly for us? Can we love when someone mistreats us? Can we love when God seems absent?
This is the course of love we are enrolled in on Earth: here surrounded by the beauty of the planet we are to learn to love—to move from me as the center of the universe—me first—to love as the center—to God who is love—first.
God’s love flows freely out to us. Are we open to being in that bright light? Do you know love? Do you embrace love? Do you express love to everyone?
Everyone who loves is born of God, born of the water and the spirit(in the Gospel of John).
Romantic love is not love. It is not eternal, sometimes it doesn’t last beyond the honeymoon. When we “ fall out of love,” see the person as he or she really is, then the work of love begins. Love then becomes a choice—I chose this person in a romantic fog; now I choose to love her completely or I am going to get what I can from her. This manipulation is not love.
Love chooses the person and loves him any way. Seeing the whole person before him—good, bad and ugly—love loves anyway.
There is no fear, hatred in love, no whining, no complaint, no manipulation, no preference for one part of a person over another. No objections, no assumptions. No baggage.
Love wants to get to know the other, to enter into his life and see what is there, to satisfy her curiosity about who is before her.
Have you caught the drift of love? Has love caught you? What is love asking of you right now? How loving are you towards the “least of these,” the rich, the poor, the alien, the friend, the neighbor, the powerful, the downtrodden? How loving are you towards those closest and dearest to you? How loving are you towards your neighbors and enemies?