J o u r n a l of Religion a n d H e a l t h , Vol. 27, No. 1, S p r i n g 1988
Editorial
Some Forms of Love There can be no question about it. Love is the greatest thing in the world. One way or another, it is a word and a feeling on everyone's lips and in everyone's heart. Its forms and expressions, presumably highly personal and private, when made public have earth-shaking effects. Thrones are vacated, political hopes destroyed, religious ambitions blasted, educational plans abandoned, scientific analyses frustrated, rational philosophies c o n t r a d i c t e d - - a n d all for love of, by, and for h u m a n beings as they make their way through the labyrinth of life in the modern world. Innumerable books have been written about love. One might t h i n k that so ancient and established an experience as love might have evoked everything t h a t could be said or sung about it eons ago, but not at all. Each century, indeed each decade, seems to produce new approaches and new ways of dealing with this phenomenon. We have had massive studies of h u m a n sexual behavior by people like Kinsey and Masters and Johnson. We have had innumerable how-to-do-it books, until it seems t h a t no smallest detail of physical sexual activity has been left undescribed and unpictured. One wonders how our forebears ever managed to propagate the race without the advice and assistance now available to every high school sophomore. We have had and are still having a series of studies of various distortions of love: Women Who Love too Much; Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them; Women Men Love, Women Men Leave; Intimate Partners; and so on, for there are m a n y more. We confess t h a t we have not read all of these books, although we have read enough to believe t h a t often they deal with real problems and can offer constructive ideas and help for those in need. If we accept Socrates' truism t h a t only the examined life is worth living, it is probably also true t h a t an examined love life is basic to health and wholeness. We have no intent to add new titles to these studies. There seems to be an abundance of authors from both sexes who have special forms and expressions of love to describe, analyze, and point toward constructive outcomes. But we t h i n k it might be helpful to mention some of the forms of love t h a t have played a vital part in h u m a n development from earliest recorded history, and no doubt for centuries before, and are still very much in the picture today as part of our cultural heritage. Indeed, in expressions appropriate to their own cultures, these forms are part of the whole h u m a n heritage. Desire is certainly a central factor in every kind of love. Everybody wants to be loved and needs to be loved. At the simplest level love is a hunger for some3
9 1988 Institutes of Religion and Health
4
Journal of Religion and Health
t h i n g or somebody one wants and needs. We reach out and try to grasp and hold the things we want and need the most. Erotic love is like this. It seeks to satisfy certain personal physical hungers through the body of another. Love at this level simply demands satisfaction. It is not especially interested in whether satisfaction is given as well as received. Some would argue t h a t such raw hunger hardly deserves the name of love at all. But all love, even the highest forms, includes a desire to be at one with another being. Hence, while love is not fully described at this primitive level, it is in a degree present. This kind of love exists between men and women, as well as between men and men and women and women. Some express physical love either with members of the same sex or of the opposite sex; they are called bisexual. All of these expressions of erotic love exist in our society and within most societies we know a n y t h i n g about. They sometimes exist at various times in the same person with varying degrees of intensity. For now we do not judge these varieties ethically. We simply note t h a t they exist, as part of the powerful impulse of love in all of us. Along with the erotic aspects of love there is another stage t h a t goes beyond simple physical gratification. This takes place when the source of gratification becomes a person, and one with whom the lover feels a special kind of belonging. This kind of love has been celebrated in popular song and story through the theme of the one and only love for whom the lover searches the whole world, finding at last the whole world in t h a t one person. This is romanticism, the idea t h a t from all the world two people have met and chosen each other as body-mates, soul-mates, constant companions, and sharers of marital bliss until death parts them. Traditional ideas of marriage are based on this hope t h a t people can and do find each other in a union so deep and close t h a t it will not be dissolved. This does happen; but it does not happen for everybody, as the divorce rate shows. It does not happen for m a n y who stay married, even though they are bitterly unhappy and their union is destructive of family values and happiness, children, and even of the participants themselves. Still, there is enough validity in the romantic idea to bind m a n y marriages together in reasonable happiness and usefulness to the people involved. We still believe that people who plan to get married should do so with the honest intention of staying married. Their serious intention can often be the determining factor in bringing about the face of permanence and stability. But a sound love relationship requires more t h a n eroticism and romanticism, more t h a n hunger and need, more t h a n the idealization of the fulfillment of desire. A sound h u m a n relationship requires friendship, mutuality, a giving and receiving of satisfaction at many levels. This kind of reciprocal relation implies self-love--not in the sense of selfishness, but in the sense of an awareness of the value of one's own self. Since love is a m u t u a l affair and each must offer the other something of value, each must have a sense of value in one's own self. We may call it self-respect or self-regard. When we are enclosed by ourselves, can t h i n k of nothing else but ourselves, we are narcissistic. But
Harry C. Meserve
5
when we have learned to take care of ourselves, to value ourselves because we must have something of worth to offer to others whom we love, then we are growing up. A friend is one who seeks to offer the other the best in himself or herself. A friend is also one who tries to help the other realize the best in himself or herself. Friends enjoy but do not use each other, advise but do not manipulate each other, give and receive m u t u a l l y without keeping accounts. No love relationship can survive long without friendship; for nobody can satisfy desires incessantly or live at the peaks of romantic oneness all the time. Friendship affirms not only togetherness but separateness, the right of each person to be an individual. "Can you go near to your friend," asked Nietzsche, "without going over to him?" Friends are not absorbed in each other; they stand apart. Yet each affirms and honors and loves the individuality of the other. Over some forty years in the parish ministry, we have performed hundreds of marriage services and counseled with m a n y more contemplating marriage. Of course, not all of the marriages we performed were "successful," nor were all those we counseled with able to work out all their problems. But we have come to believe t h a t one of the essentials of a sound and durable marriage relationship which retains and deepens the quality of love in each partner is a serious concern on each side to help the other become the best and happiest person he or she can be. The ecstasies of sex by themselves can grow stale; the qualities of romanticism can continue, but they are not enough by themselves either. Friendship and companionship are essential to the growth and fulfillm e n t of love. One may like somebody one does not love romantically; but it is all but impossible to love permanently somebody one does not really like. It was no less an authority t h a n St. Thomas Aquinas who summed up Aristotle's exposition of friendship in five propositions: 9 in the first place, every friend wishes his friend to be and to live; second, he desires good things for him; third, he does good things to him; fourth, he takes pleasure in his company; fifth, he is of one mind with him rejoicing and sorrowing in almost the same things. The qualifying adverb "almost" is important. Friendship does not require complete agreement between two people, but it does thrive on m u t u a l understanding and m u t u a l acceptance of individual differences. Erotic, romantic, and friendly relations all contribute to healthy love. Beyond these are two more expressions of love t h a t play an important role in hum a n relationships. One of these we m a y call "community." Most people who love must learn to express their personal love for each other within the context of a larger community. Most of our lives are sustained and nourished, protected, disciplined, and enhanced because we are members of various communities. We attend churches, send our children to schools, participate in various economic arrangements where our cooperation is expected in return for advantages we seek, find beauty and meaning in numerous shared artistic, cultural,
6
Journal of Religion and Health
environmental, and educational activities, support ethical values through numerous social and political causes, find vocations or avocations t h a t strengthen and enrich our individual lives. Few individuals live to themselves alone; few lovers live to their own love alone. Often their personal lives are enlarged and made more interesting by active involvement in communal affairs. In some societies which are largely authoritarian, this kind of communal activity is regarded as deviant and dangerous to the society as a whole. It is one of the basic characteristics of a free society t h a t it makes room for and encourages the existence of a large number of voluntary groups within which people are free to carry out their particular interests and express their social ideals and cultural and aesthetic concerns. Many of these groups involve concerns and interests t h a t are significant to only a few people. Some are eccentric and even irritating. Do we really need, for instance, all those sons and daughters of various American wars and revolutions? Do we need a bass-fishing society or a society for the promotion of bluebirds, owls, or old crows? Would it not be more efficient to have some system of uniting some of these groups into a smaller number of institutions? The answer is yes, it might be, but it is even more important to keep alive the special interests of special individuals. They impart liveliness, variety, and interest to community life. Hence, the more the merrier so far as democracy is concerned. They help provide ways of personal self-expression t h a t enriches the lives of individuals and provides safeguards against the dull conformity and the intellectual and emotional vacuum on which dictatorship feeds. Moreover, sometimes these groups make a real difference and have a powerful impact for good. Small religious sects like the Friends and the Brethren have contributed much to the more general peace movement. Small sects have helped change the thinking of vast, highly organized institutions, as the early Christian communities changed the Roman Empire, or the monastic movements changed the Roman Church, or the Protestant sects created a productive ferment within the non-Catholic communities. Communal groups are the way love finds social expression, through trial and error, experiments t h a t fail as well as those t h a t survive, new ideas t h a t receive preliminary testing. People who love each other find ways of making their love flow over into community life. This is the essence, we think, of the Pauline .Nord "agape," love t h a t transcends selfish satisfaction and possessiveness and seeks to enlarge, deepen, and direct our natural h u m a n sympathy and love. Agape heals and reconciles h u m a n conflicts and differences. It is, as Paul said, "the greatest" thing because it grows out of our trust in one another and our hope that t h a t trust can be realized in larger dimensions t h a n our limited personal life." There is a final quality of love t h a t seems to strengthen and seal into a kind of u n i t y the other forms we have mentioned. One might call it a person's comm i t m e n t to ultimate values. Love does not mean the ultimate giving up of the self if t h a t surrender means the sacrifice of conscience, of a basic sense of identity, of an awareness of being answerable to ultimate values. Awareness of this
Harry C. Meserve
7
foundation of one's own being has nowhere been more simply and eloquently put t h a n in Dag HammarskSld's book M a r k i n g s : I don't know Who--or what--put the question, I don't know when it was put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone--or Something--and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal. Perhaps the most important thing each person m a y do to improve the quality of love t h a t is given and love t h a t is received is to discover and nourish t h a t ultimate value in one's personal life and respect it in the live of others. There is an excellence, a fullness, a superfluity of power and love to which each one poo tentially belongs and to which each one in the long run is answerable. Preservation of one's own personal integrity enhances the value and the power of the love one is able both to give and to receive. We do not claim t h a t general, long-established forms of love like these are a substitute for psychological skill and techniques of therapy. We do suggest t h a t keeping these long-range values in mind m a y make skill and therapy in the cure of souls more effective by helping them to go deeper. H a r r y C. Meserve
Editorial
Some Forms of Love There can be no question about it. Love is the greatest thing in the world. One way or another, it is a word and a feeling on everyone's lips and in everyone's heart. Its forms and expressions, presumably highly personal and private, when made public have earth-shaking effects. Thrones are vacated, political hopes destroyed, religious ambitions blasted, educational plans abandoned, scientific analyses frustrated, rational philosophies c o n t r a d i c t e d - - a n d all for love of, by, and for h u m a n beings as they make their way through the labyrinth of life in the modern world. Innumerable books have been written about love. One might t h i n k that so ancient and established an experience as love might have evoked everything t h a t could be said or sung about it eons ago, but not at all. Each century, indeed each decade, seems to produce new approaches and new ways of dealing with this phenomenon. We have had massive studies of h u m a n sexual behavior by people like Kinsey and Masters and Johnson. We have had innumerable how-to-do-it books, until it seems t h a t no smallest detail of physical sexual activity has been left undescribed and unpictured. One wonders how our forebears ever managed to propagate the race without the advice and assistance now available to every high school sophomore. We have had and are still having a series of studies of various distortions of love: Women Who Love too Much; Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them; Women Men Love, Women Men Leave; Intimate Partners; and so on, for there are m a n y more. We confess t h a t we have not read all of these books, although we have read enough to believe t h a t often they deal with real problems and can offer constructive ideas and help for those in need. If we accept Socrates' truism t h a t only the examined life is worth living, it is probably also true t h a t an examined love life is basic to health and wholeness. We have no intent to add new titles to these studies. There seems to be an abundance of authors from both sexes who have special forms and expressions of love to describe, analyze, and point toward constructive outcomes. But we t h i n k it might be helpful to mention some of the forms of love t h a t have played a vital part in h u m a n development from earliest recorded history, and no doubt for centuries before, and are still very much in the picture today as part of our cultural heritage. Indeed, in expressions appropriate to their own cultures, these forms are part of the whole h u m a n heritage. Desire is certainly a central factor in every kind of love. Everybody wants to be loved and needs to be loved. At the simplest level love is a hunger for some3
9 1988 Institutes of Religion and Health
4
Journal of Religion and Health
t h i n g or somebody one wants and needs. We reach out and try to grasp and hold the things we want and need the most. Erotic love is like this. It seeks to satisfy certain personal physical hungers through the body of another. Love at this level simply demands satisfaction. It is not especially interested in whether satisfaction is given as well as received. Some would argue t h a t such raw hunger hardly deserves the name of love at all. But all love, even the highest forms, includes a desire to be at one with another being. Hence, while love is not fully described at this primitive level, it is in a degree present. This kind of love exists between men and women, as well as between men and men and women and women. Some express physical love either with members of the same sex or of the opposite sex; they are called bisexual. All of these expressions of erotic love exist in our society and within most societies we know a n y t h i n g about. They sometimes exist at various times in the same person with varying degrees of intensity. For now we do not judge these varieties ethically. We simply note t h a t they exist, as part of the powerful impulse of love in all of us. Along with the erotic aspects of love there is another stage t h a t goes beyond simple physical gratification. This takes place when the source of gratification becomes a person, and one with whom the lover feels a special kind of belonging. This kind of love has been celebrated in popular song and story through the theme of the one and only love for whom the lover searches the whole world, finding at last the whole world in t h a t one person. This is romanticism, the idea t h a t from all the world two people have met and chosen each other as body-mates, soul-mates, constant companions, and sharers of marital bliss until death parts them. Traditional ideas of marriage are based on this hope t h a t people can and do find each other in a union so deep and close t h a t it will not be dissolved. This does happen; but it does not happen for everybody, as the divorce rate shows. It does not happen for m a n y who stay married, even though they are bitterly unhappy and their union is destructive of family values and happiness, children, and even of the participants themselves. Still, there is enough validity in the romantic idea to bind m a n y marriages together in reasonable happiness and usefulness to the people involved. We still believe that people who plan to get married should do so with the honest intention of staying married. Their serious intention can often be the determining factor in bringing about the face of permanence and stability. But a sound love relationship requires more t h a n eroticism and romanticism, more t h a n hunger and need, more t h a n the idealization of the fulfillment of desire. A sound h u m a n relationship requires friendship, mutuality, a giving and receiving of satisfaction at many levels. This kind of reciprocal relation implies self-love--not in the sense of selfishness, but in the sense of an awareness of the value of one's own self. Since love is a m u t u a l affair and each must offer the other something of value, each must have a sense of value in one's own self. We may call it self-respect or self-regard. When we are enclosed by ourselves, can t h i n k of nothing else but ourselves, we are narcissistic. But
Harry C. Meserve
5
when we have learned to take care of ourselves, to value ourselves because we must have something of worth to offer to others whom we love, then we are growing up. A friend is one who seeks to offer the other the best in himself or herself. A friend is also one who tries to help the other realize the best in himself or herself. Friends enjoy but do not use each other, advise but do not manipulate each other, give and receive m u t u a l l y without keeping accounts. No love relationship can survive long without friendship; for nobody can satisfy desires incessantly or live at the peaks of romantic oneness all the time. Friendship affirms not only togetherness but separateness, the right of each person to be an individual. "Can you go near to your friend," asked Nietzsche, "without going over to him?" Friends are not absorbed in each other; they stand apart. Yet each affirms and honors and loves the individuality of the other. Over some forty years in the parish ministry, we have performed hundreds of marriage services and counseled with m a n y more contemplating marriage. Of course, not all of the marriages we performed were "successful," nor were all those we counseled with able to work out all their problems. But we have come to believe t h a t one of the essentials of a sound and durable marriage relationship which retains and deepens the quality of love in each partner is a serious concern on each side to help the other become the best and happiest person he or she can be. The ecstasies of sex by themselves can grow stale; the qualities of romanticism can continue, but they are not enough by themselves either. Friendship and companionship are essential to the growth and fulfillm e n t of love. One may like somebody one does not love romantically; but it is all but impossible to love permanently somebody one does not really like. It was no less an authority t h a n St. Thomas Aquinas who summed up Aristotle's exposition of friendship in five propositions: 9 in the first place, every friend wishes his friend to be and to live; second, he desires good things for him; third, he does good things to him; fourth, he takes pleasure in his company; fifth, he is of one mind with him rejoicing and sorrowing in almost the same things. The qualifying adverb "almost" is important. Friendship does not require complete agreement between two people, but it does thrive on m u t u a l understanding and m u t u a l acceptance of individual differences. Erotic, romantic, and friendly relations all contribute to healthy love. Beyond these are two more expressions of love t h a t play an important role in hum a n relationships. One of these we m a y call "community." Most people who love must learn to express their personal love for each other within the context of a larger community. Most of our lives are sustained and nourished, protected, disciplined, and enhanced because we are members of various communities. We attend churches, send our children to schools, participate in various economic arrangements where our cooperation is expected in return for advantages we seek, find beauty and meaning in numerous shared artistic, cultural,
6
Journal of Religion and Health
environmental, and educational activities, support ethical values through numerous social and political causes, find vocations or avocations t h a t strengthen and enrich our individual lives. Few individuals live to themselves alone; few lovers live to their own love alone. Often their personal lives are enlarged and made more interesting by active involvement in communal affairs. In some societies which are largely authoritarian, this kind of communal activity is regarded as deviant and dangerous to the society as a whole. It is one of the basic characteristics of a free society t h a t it makes room for and encourages the existence of a large number of voluntary groups within which people are free to carry out their particular interests and express their social ideals and cultural and aesthetic concerns. Many of these groups involve concerns and interests t h a t are significant to only a few people. Some are eccentric and even irritating. Do we really need, for instance, all those sons and daughters of various American wars and revolutions? Do we need a bass-fishing society or a society for the promotion of bluebirds, owls, or old crows? Would it not be more efficient to have some system of uniting some of these groups into a smaller number of institutions? The answer is yes, it might be, but it is even more important to keep alive the special interests of special individuals. They impart liveliness, variety, and interest to community life. Hence, the more the merrier so far as democracy is concerned. They help provide ways of personal self-expression t h a t enriches the lives of individuals and provides safeguards against the dull conformity and the intellectual and emotional vacuum on which dictatorship feeds. Moreover, sometimes these groups make a real difference and have a powerful impact for good. Small religious sects like the Friends and the Brethren have contributed much to the more general peace movement. Small sects have helped change the thinking of vast, highly organized institutions, as the early Christian communities changed the Roman Empire, or the monastic movements changed the Roman Church, or the Protestant sects created a productive ferment within the non-Catholic communities. Communal groups are the way love finds social expression, through trial and error, experiments t h a t fail as well as those t h a t survive, new ideas t h a t receive preliminary testing. People who love each other find ways of making their love flow over into community life. This is the essence, we think, of the Pauline .Nord "agape," love t h a t transcends selfish satisfaction and possessiveness and seeks to enlarge, deepen, and direct our natural h u m a n sympathy and love. Agape heals and reconciles h u m a n conflicts and differences. It is, as Paul said, "the greatest" thing because it grows out of our trust in one another and our hope that t h a t trust can be realized in larger dimensions t h a n our limited personal life." There is a final quality of love t h a t seems to strengthen and seal into a kind of u n i t y the other forms we have mentioned. One might call it a person's comm i t m e n t to ultimate values. Love does not mean the ultimate giving up of the self if t h a t surrender means the sacrifice of conscience, of a basic sense of identity, of an awareness of being answerable to ultimate values. Awareness of this
Harry C. Meserve
7
foundation of one's own being has nowhere been more simply and eloquently put t h a n in Dag HammarskSld's book M a r k i n g s : I don't know Who--or what--put the question, I don't know when it was put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone--or Something--and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal. Perhaps the most important thing each person m a y do to improve the quality of love t h a t is given and love t h a t is received is to discover and nourish t h a t ultimate value in one's personal life and respect it in the live of others. There is an excellence, a fullness, a superfluity of power and love to which each one poo tentially belongs and to which each one in the long run is answerable. Preservation of one's own personal integrity enhances the value and the power of the love one is able both to give and to receive. We do not claim t h a t general, long-established forms of love like these are a substitute for psychological skill and techniques of therapy. We do suggest t h a t keeping these long-range values in mind m a y make skill and therapy in the cure of souls more effective by helping them to go deeper. H a r r y C. Meserve
