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.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SHEILA FLORANCE AND ME

Image
My first meeting with Sheila. In the 1960s I was an impressionable seventeen-year-old keenly interested in following a career in the arts. My new boyfriend Peter Oyston took me into the ABC television studios to meet his mother who was working as a floor manager there. I knew she was an actress, a kind of alien species I had never encountered except in the movies, and I was nervous, expecting someone formidable. My first impression was of the usual middle-aged mum – a bit dowdy with a boring suburban woman’s permed hairdo (it was done that way for a play apparently). She didn’t appear one bit unusual. Then, ‘Hello dear,’ Sheila said sweetly as one does to little children. ‘Would you like a glass of milk?’ A horrified Peter whispered, ‘Sheil, she’s seventeen.’ (Sheil? I thought, I couldn’t imagine calling my mother by her given name). Then the extraordinary Sheila Florance screeched, threw her head back and burst into ripples of very loud laughter. And this being...
Read more

BUSHFIRES, BLACK FRIDAY SHOPPING AND QUESTIONS OF MATURITY

Image
I had a startling experience on November 24. It was a Friday. I opened my email inbox to find loads of messages encouraging me to enjoy the 20%, 40% etc discounts on all products 'Today Black Friday only!'  On Black Friday?! In Victoria, Australia, my home, there are certain days, black days that mark the most horrific bushfires, the unbelievable devastation and death, and the blackened land left in their wake. For example, there was Black Saturday of 2009 and one of the earliest devastations recorded (by European Aussies) on Black Friday, 1939. I wasn't alive for that one but it's  our history, the history of people pushing too carelessly, without understanding, into a dry, heat prone, vulnerable and threatened land. Bushfires were my nightmare w hen I lived in the country . I still dread hot north wind summer days in case, in case ... I have walked through the aftermath, lost a friend in a bushfire and can barely imagine the horror of being in one.  Oh,...
Read more

Comedy: The Fleeting Freedom of Laughter

Image
Melbourne, my home, is not the only city that has a month-long Comedy Festival. Comedy has always been popular.  It  can be cruel and crass, but good comedy  tweaks reality and tickles the mind and emotions. When we laugh, momentarily we become free as a child, released from what life has thrown at us, from the crises that create personal havoc to the mess the world is in. . Especially through the irony of self-reflective parody and satire we open up and can see the world from a new angle. This doesn’t happen when we choose to enter a comfortable bubble and associate only with those who are like us. Or when we protest until we boil over into anger that only makes everything worse. Or we sink into existential gloom. Better then to throw up our hands and turn despair into comedy – that is, if we can. I have just re-read George Orwell’s famous and bitterly satirical novel 1984, and was shocked agai...
Read more