TRANSFORMING LOVE


When someone says, ‘I love you’, that potent word ‘love’ can lead to embarrassing misunderstandings. This is because in English it has a range of interpretations and we need to ask, ‘What do you mean by love? Other languages are more efficient. In Greek, there are at least eight different words.
Four words in particular mark the evolution of love into its purest expression, with each earlier stage enfolded and enriched within the ‘DNA’ of what follows. These are eros, storge, philia and agapé. Ancient Greek philosophers so revered love in its highest form, they compared the way love transforms and evolves to a fat caterpillar metamorphosing and taking flight as a beautiful butterfly.
Eros
The first budding of love emerges in passionate infant desire for the one who nurtures it and appeases its hunger. That’s eros – it’s a desire-filled hunger, and it is experienced in all the myriad ways where pleasure is sought, including food and sex. Eros is a life force. We couldn’t survive without it. But if love never shifts beyond that level, it becomes a self-absorbed, narcissistic, greedy form of love. Yet desires can never be satisfied. You only have to look around to recognise adults still bogged down in eros.
Storge
Love first becomes more outward-looking in storge, the bond between those we know as family or tribe – those who are ‘our kind’.  Growing up in such an environment gives a child security. Removing this can have devastating effects on a developing psyche. In adulthood loving this way is comfortable and safe. We feel easier with those who are like us, which includes by extension our nation. This is natural enough, but when it turns into fear of the ‘alien’, or rejection and hatred of difference, this is to be trapped in storge   
Philia
Maturity involves philia. Love evolves when we reach out to communicate equally through warmth and like-mindedness. Philia is an open-minded consciousness that seeks friendship and understanding, including with the stranger or foreigner. Philosophers recognised the outcome as gaining knowledge. But beware, said the philosophers, of believing that knowledge, however grand, is yours to be argued over. For it will not become wisdom unless you acknowledge the source, divine Sophia. Then philia brings with it an intimation of the highest love, agapé, which encompasses all other loves yet is not limited by any outward expression.
Agapé
Agapé means we see and know everything as it is, not in any way filtered through our opinions, needs, conditions or desires. It requires empathy, conscious intention, and action. It must be alive in the soul and expressed in the world. Agapé also involves clear and insightful self-awareness. Only through agapé can we find the freedom to remain true to who we are in the face of enmity, to love those who despise us, and not seek revenge and payback for hurt. Agapé is the love that nourishes the soul’s growth in another person, whatever the relationship. And in a relationship based on agapé, earthly love is crowned with divine love.
Agapé is sorely needed in our world. It seems to be an unreachable ideal, yet every individual who strives towards the fullest expression of love is helping the world to heal a little. All creation takes part when bodies, hearts and minds are transformed though love. And that is beautiful.




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