Is love the exception?

“In these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die, the way you invest your love is the way you invest your life.” – Mumford and Sons

“Is your love enough, or can you love some more?” – Michael Franti and Spearhead

Try to find anything in the universe where more is always optimal.

I posed this thought exercise in a foundational articulation of my worldview: the middle way. The answer, I quickly and confidently replied, was that there is nothing. Water and oxygen, courage and joy, even hope—all vital and beautiful in moderation, in balance; all distracting or destructive in excess. Everything, I happily crow, is paradox.

Or is it? Is there one glaring exception to the laws of balancing contradictions that seem to rule reality?

Several people challenged my use of love as a difficult example that proves the rule. I argued that even unconditional love needs to be in balance with its opposite for life to thrive, drawing on wise minds like Eric Fromm who, according to Richard Rohr, claimed that “the healthiest people he has known, and those who very often grow up in the most natural way, are those who, between their two parents and early authority figures, experienced a combination of unconditional love along with very conditional and demanding love."

We all need boundaries, challenges, pushes out of our comfortable shelters to thrive and live in balance with the world and our fellow messy humans. Otherwise, we slouch towards narcissism, lethargy, and delusion, a pale shadow of the life we have been gifted. Rohr and Fromm are right to highlight this necessity (current American culture has often struggled to remember this truth).

But are they right to label it as “conditional” love? Can true love ever have conditions? Thich Nhat Hanh captures the same tension with the terms gentle compassion and fierce compassion. Love can certainly be fierce, as anyone who has ever fought with a parent or spouse knows. But the ferocity flows within love, not in opposition to it.

Even if we make the leap and accept Fromm’s case that love can have conditions, the tension he articulates is still between two forms of love. All the other tensions we wrestle with—enough and not enough; confidence and humility; ambition and acceptance—stand separate from each other. In this case, it’s a struggle of love with itself.

The opposite of love, as the Lumineers remind us, is indifference. But the parent or coach that Fromm celebrates for setting a high bar for their child is not channeling indifference. We can call them demanding or domineering or even abusive, but never indifferent.

Do we ever want to increase indifference in our lives? We all need to numb sometimes, to temporarily protect ourselves from intense surges of emotion and energy that could overwhelm us and prevent us from functioning. But isn’t that protection a form of love? Numbing for its own sake would be cutting us off from life, casting us spinning towards an abyss of nihilism and despair.

Maybe love is the exception. Maybe we can never have enough love. Maybe, maybe, maybe, that exception is the key to the meaning that we all constantly seek in this eyeblink of a lifetime we are all given. Maybe that is why we are here—to grow the love we give and receive as much as we can before we leave.

The One Art

Consider how extraordinary that would be. Of all the things in this vast universe that our greatest scientists and philosophers and theologians have considered, what if love is the only one we should seek to endlessly increase?

I consider myself a loving person. I have had my heart stretched open in ways that I can barely begin to describe. But there is so, so much more I can learn about love.

Love is so much more, so much larger and more complex, than our modern stories tell us. It is an art more intricate and challenging than any other. I have come to define my life as one great practice of that art of loving, to see the moments of my days—work and parenting, errands and conflicts— as splattering paint across these four canvases:

1.     Love of self – This body and mind and in every way that they manifest, especially as they evolve and fade with age;

2.     Love of others – Family and friends in all their contradictions and complexity and everyone who enters my life however briefly, from the smiling waiter to the snarling driver honking on the highway;

3.     Love of humanity – The billions I will never meet, living and dead, and our perpetual collective dance of such beauty and such brutality;

4.     Love of life and reality – All of this – swirling nebulae, teeming reefs, morning skies stained orange and black with wildfire smoke, and the inevitable end of all of them. The gift of creation, and the consciousness to witness it.

Some of this practice comes easily. My love often flows smoothly when I or my friends or my colleagues or the world are meeting my expectations of what is good and right and safe. That is beautiful, essential to the grand piece. But it is just the beginning, a first pencil sketch. The true art comes in loving the unlovable. 

We only truly love ourselves when we love the darkest, ugliest corners of our being, the worst things we have ever done, ever said, ever thought. We only truly love our family and friends when we love them while they frustrate and wound us. We only truly love humanity when we love the worst of us in our worst moments—the tyranny and massacres and abuse. We only love life if we love death.

True love is a package deal—we have to take it all. That is why it is an art that few, if any of us, will master in our lifetime. But we can try. Oh, we can try.

How can we begin to love the most brutal aspects of humanity and life when we gape in horror at headlines every morning? How can we love beings that seem so intent on destroying the planet and each other? I don’t pretend to have come anywhere close to that goal, but I sense that the key lies in how broadly we define love.

The love of the most broken, brutal things of the world is not the warm glow of romantic or parental love. It is an acceptance that is seared into our perception once we have tried to find any other possible way out, an acceptance of the contradictions of reality. We cannot have soil without decay, predators without prey, courage without cowardice, beauty without brutality, creation without destruction. None of us will ever know why the universe is made this way, but it is. We can either try to embrace that reality or reject it, hardening our hearts and burying our lifeforce beneath layers of cynicism and distraction and judgment.

That deeper conception of love does mean we excuse or tolerate brutality and injustice. Some of the greatest models of true love for humanity and reality were also our greatest agents of social change from Gandhi to Desmond Tutu to Martin Luther King Jr. They fiercely resisted oppression and exploitation and inequality, but they did so while fiercely loving those who opposed them no matter how harsh and hateful they might be. Thich Nhat Hanh fiercely worked for the end of wars while clearly seeing himself in the arms dealers who fueled those wars. By seeing that he had as much capacity for violence as the arms dealers and they had as much capacity for grace as him, he could fiercely love them, himself, and the reality that had created all of them.  

In the same way, all of us, somewhere within our storm of wounds and wants and weaknesses, have the same capacity as those great lovers and shapers of the world. If any of us can reach that deeper love, so can we all.

Love Beyond Heaven and Hell

Those shining exemplars highlight the greatest challenge to the idea that love is the exception to the universal rule of life as contradicting force. Thich Nhat Hanh both loves and doesn’t love the murderous pirate—isn’t that just another paradox?

One of our greatest poets offers an explanation. Strange as it may seem to anyone who recalls souls trapped in flaming tombs or drowning in rivers of boiling blood, Dante’s Divine Comedy is a love story. In Dante’s cosmology, our love flings us into hell just as it calls us up to purgatory or paradise. We enter hell when we love the wrong things (status and power) or love a good thing too much (food and sex).

This makes sense if you read Dante as an allegory for our daily lives. My mind and body are on fire when I imagine revenging myself on a former colleague. I am calm and cool when I let go of my wounded pride and the project and people involved as another fragment of this great work of art I find myself within. Buddhists agree that heaven and hell are choices we make in every moment.

According to Dante (and many others) we can have too much love. That would suggest that love is not an exception; it is a great balancing act like everything else in this life. But in his worldview, we can only have too much of a certain type of love. He calls it love of worldly things. Buddhists call the same thing attachment to the impermanent.

I can have too much love for my small self, my achievements and appearance. I can have too much love for the small version of my family, their behaviors and words. I can have too much love for the small versions of my country or of humanity, the acts of violence and bigotry and greed.

But I cannot, Dante affirms, have too much love for the highest versions of all of them. What is that version? It is the whole that perfectly integrates all the contradictions, all the paradoxes, that balances all shadow and darkness and with an equal amount of light. This love stands above paradox. It pulls our hearts up beyond time and space, drowning our little worries and wants in its twin sister, wonder. Together, they call us to look at that driver who cuts us off on the highway and think: “what a miracle that you exist in all your astonishing complexity and beauty, and what grief that you have to die like everyone and everything else.”

It is this higher love that has led mystics of all traditions to conclude that the ground of reality is love. Call it the ultimate or Source or God or the Tao, that love is boundless and ever-present—we could never give or receive too much of it. The only question is whether we can let go of our attachment to the smaller version of everything and turn our hearts and minds constantly back to that wider perspective.

Many who see the world this way devote their lives to holding higher love through contemplation, sitting quietly in monasteries or whirling in deep trances. But to grow their love Gandhi and King and Tutu did not retreat from the broken things and people of the world, they embraced them. These masters of the art were able to loosen some of the tightest knots strangling humanity because, as Richard Rohr says, they were people who could “see oneness because they look out from oneness, instead of labeling everything as superior and inferior, in or out.” How many of us pursuing change today, whether in our relationships or workplaces or countries, see the world this way? How many of us look at our opponents and ourselves as one in the end, neither superior or inferior?

This has all been said millions of times before. It has been said for thousands of years. It has shaped countless lives and communities. I say it all again partly to affirm and remind myself, partly to open discussion with those who are also exploring this art, but mostly I say it, like so much else in these reflections, as a gift to my children. I expect to spend the rest of my life trying to learn and articulate this love beyond love that encompasses the most broken things. I hope some of that exploration will linger with them long after I have gone. But if there were only one part of me that they hold fast, I hope it is this line at the heart of the book I wrote them at this beginning of this journey:

Love everything in the river, as much as I love everything in you.

I believe that is the art of higher love. Like all art, it is so simple and so endlessly complex and hard to bring to life. Beneath all our struggle and confusion, our striving and failure, our doubts and grand ideas, what if we are all simply here to love everything as deeply as we are loved?

May we all look on the world in this way. May we all remember to love everything in the river.