More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
it was clear to me that life was not worth living if we did not know love.
it was love’s absence that let me know how much love mattered.
We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago, when we were little and had no voice to speak the heart’s longing.
love returns us to the promise of everlasting life. When we love we can let our hearts speak.
My grief was a heavy, despairing sadness caused by parting from a companion of many years but, more important, it was a despair rooted in the fear that love did not exist, could not be found. And even if it were lurking somewhere, I might never know it in my lifetime.
we yearn for love—that we seek it—even when we lack hope that it really can be found.
Movies, music, magazines, and books are the place where we turn to hear our yearnings for love expressed.
Youth culture today is cynical about love. And that cynicism has come from their pervasive feeling that love cannot be found.
Young people are cynical about love. Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.
young listeners remain reluctant to embrace the idea of love as a transformative force.
Men theorize about love, but women are more often love’s practitioners. Most men feel that they receive love and therefore know what it feels like to be loved; women often feel we are in a constant state of yearning, wanting love but not receiving it.
There was absolutely no need to be this loud
Contemplating death has always been a subject that leads me back to love.
Men often write about love through fantasy, through what they imagine is possible rather than what they concretely know.
It is easier to articulate the pain of love’s absence than to describe its presence and meaning in our lives.
We must face the confusion and disappointment that much of what we were taught about the nature of love makes no sense when applied to daily life.
Our confusion about what we mean when we use the word “love” is the source of our difficulty in loving.
“Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one can agree on what it is.”
love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Explaining further, he continues: “Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” Since the choice must be made to nurture growth, this definition counters the more widely accepted assumption that we love instinctually.
Affection is only one ingredient of love. To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients—care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.
That process of investment wherein a loved one becomes important to us is called “cathexis.” In his book Peck rightly emphasizes that most of us “confuse cathecting with loving.”
When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse cannot coexist.
My family of origin provided, throughout my childhood, a dysfunctional setting and it remains one. This does not mean that it is not also a setting in which affection, delight, and care are present.
Remember, care is a dimension of love, but simply giving care does not mean we are loving.
So many of us long for love but lack the courage to take risks.
To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility.
When we are loving we openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust.
Why was harsh punishment a gesture of love?
“It hurts me more than it hurts you.” There is nothing that creates more confusion about love in the minds and hearts of children than unkind and/or cruel punishment
One of the most important social myths we must debunk if we are to become a more loving culture is the one that teaches parents that abuse and neglect can coexist with love.
Love is as love does, and it is our responsibility to give children love. When we love children we acknowledge by our every action that they are not property, that they have rights—that we respect and uphold their rights. Without justice there can be no love.
Patriarchy tells us daily through movies, television, and magazines that men of power can do whatever they want, that it’s this freedom that makes them men.
boys are taught to behave as though love does not matter, in their hearts they yearn for it.
Trust is the foundation of intimacy. When lies erode trust, genuine connection cannot take place.
To know love we have to tell the truth to ourselves and to others. Creating a false self to mask fears and insecurities has become so common that many of us forget who we are and what we feel underneath the pretense.
The wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings.
While it is important for us to understand the origins of fragile self-esteem, it is also possible to bypass this stage (identifying when and where we received negative socialization) and still create a foundation for building self-love.
If we succeed without confronting and changing shaky foundations of low self-esteem rooted in contempt and hatred, we will falter along the way.
Doing work we hate assaults our self-esteem and self-confidence.
Imagine how different our lives would be if all the individuals who claim to be Christians, or who claim to be religious, were setting an example for everyone by being loving.
In their work, loving practice is not aimed at simply giving an individual greater life satisfaction; it is extolled as the primary way we end domination and oppression. This important politicization of love is often absent from today’s writing.
“All other spiritual teachings are in vain if we cannot love. Even the most exalted states and the most exceptional spiritual accomplishments are unimportant if we cannot be happy in the most basic and ordinary ways, if, with our hearts, we cannot touch one another and the life we have been given. What matters is how we live.”
My belief that God is love—that love is everything, our true destiny—sustains me. I affirm these beliefs through daily meditation and prayer, through contemplation and service, through worship and loving kindness.
“anyone who does not know love is still in death.”
There is a gap between the values they claim to hold and their willingness to do the work of connecting thought and action, theory and practice to realize these values and thus create a more just society.
do fear and fear keeps us from trusting in love.
The need for instant gratification is a component of greed.
Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified.
When the politics of greed become a cultural norm, all acts of charity are wrongly seen as suspect and are represented as a gesture of the weak.
maintain and satisfy greed, one must support domination. And the world of domination is always a world without love.
Her hope is that everyone will be seduced by the fantasy and will ignore the reality that deceit, betrayal, and a lack of care for the feelings of others can never be a place where love will flourish.
