This Is Our Story

This is Our Story

Humanity United in Action,
Driven By Love and Compassion,
Informed by Science and Reason.

Value for Sunday of Week 38 in the season of Fulfillment

Loving

Mary Cassatt, Mother and Child Smiling at Each Other (1908)

Love is the emotion that mirrors the well-being of the loved one(s).

  • . . . love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence . . . [Erich Fromm]
  • The love that flowed between them was such as no young lovers in the heat and impatience of their passion could know; it was a love enriched by time, by a great crowding host of memories, by the small daily sacrifices of self that made a larger self and a deeper love. [Page Smith, John Adams, Volume II 1784-1826, chapter LXXI.]
  • Deep within us – no matter who we are – there lives a feeling of wanting to be lovable, of wanting to be the kind of person that others like to be with. And the greatest thing we can do is to let people know that they are loved and capable of loving. [Fred Rogers.]
  • If both the physiological and the safety needs are fairly well gratified, then there will emerge the love and affection and belongingness needs, and the whole cycle [p. 381] already described will repeat itself with this new center. Now the person will feel keenly, as never before, the absence of friends, or a sweetheart, or a wife, or children. He will hunger for affectionate relations with people in general, namely, for a place in his group, and he will strive with great intensity to achieve this goal. He will want to attain such a place more than anything else in the world and may even forget that once, when he was hungry, he sneered at love. [Abraham Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation” (1943).]

Love is the great Creative Force in the emotions in our sacred relations with living beings. We might define it as the emotion that mirrors the welfare of the loved one(s): if you are happy when another person is happy and sad when that person is sad, then you love that person.

In making this point, I am using one of several concepts of love. The word can refer to many things: “. . . the single term is used to convey several complex meanings: familial love, friendship love, parental love, spiritual love, strong individual and/or collective caring and nurturing actions towards others, and strong feelings towards objects and pastimes.” In our model, it refers to all of these, except feelings towards objects and pastimes; Love implies a relationship to living beings.

Two elements bring them together: passion and the particular kind of harmony we call solicitude or concern for the other’s well-being. Thus, we could call Love a passionate harmony with the loved one(s). We see the harmonic side in many settings, including: compassionate love for the elderly, and compassionate love during and after pregnancy. Brain imaging studies provide evidence that “marental and passionate” love have similar neurobiological foundations. Passion gives Love its strength; harmony gives Love its character.

Love drives us to act in ways and with an energy that we might not be able to display under any other circumstances. People have been known to lift amounts of weight off a loved one’s body that they could not lift under normal circumstances. In those cases, a rush of adrenaline has given the lover strength that may seem superhuman. It is our intense passion for our loved ones that impels us to devote our energies toward them. Romantic love, often called amore, or eros, places an emphasis on passion, and requires repeated infusions of harmony all the more for it.

Love can have long-lasting effects. “Parental warmth during childhood predicts coping and well-being in adulthood”. Children’s feelings of being loved are important aspects of this.

Harmony is the stabilizing force that makes Love endure, and that ensures that our energies are not only directed toward the loved ones but devoted to their welfare. Agape, or universal Love, emphasizes this harmony. When coupled with an intense passion, harmonic Love can be life-changing.

Some people say the opposite of Love is hatred, others say it is indifference, and still others say it is fear. Sometimes they will argue about who is right. Each of them is right, but if they are arguing about it, then each of them is also wrong, because they fail to recognize that they are referring to three separate things. The person who says that Love’s opposite is hatred is focused on Love’s harmonic component: hatred is a passionate disharmony with the object of emotion, incorrectly called Love in such a case. The person who identifies Love’s opposite as indifference is focused on passion: indifference is an absence of passion. The person who identifies Love’s opposite as fear is focused on Love as an experience of the lover: fear blocks Love. There is no need for you ever to have that argument again, and if anyone takes one side or the other in it, you can correct them.

In many cultures, including Western consumer cultures, the emphasis is mainly on passion: a young man experiences a rush of hormones at the sight of a pretty girl, and confuses it with Love. That is only passion; as experience shows, that kind of “love” almost always is short-lived. Love is easily and frequently conflated with sex. “ . . . human sexuality (is) a form of language, whereby feelings ranging from love to indifference to exercise of power to hatred can be expressed.” However: “Healthy sexual functioning plays an essential role in maintaining the harmony and happiness in marital life. It provides a media to express love . . .” 

In romantic relationships, partners can express their love through “love languages” “words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch”. “. . . affectionate touch is a relatively stable characteristic of human romantic relationships that is robustly and reliably related to the degree of reported love between partners.” All of the love languages operate in harmony with the loved one.

False (non-harmonic) love can easily turn ugly. A man who has strong passionate feelings for a woman may only be experiencing a biological imperative to reproduce. If his expectations are not met, passion can turn to violence, as we have often seen. Excessive drinking can lead to violence in romantic relationships, which usually reflects underlying weaknesses in the relationship. Sustaining long-term committed and loving relationships takes work. A lack of love-harmony is also seen in pathological narcissists.

“. . . love is universal and applies to people of all cultures, races, ethnicities, religion and sexual orientations . . .” It is essential to human well-being. “One can see love as a ‘glue’ that helps integrate different aspects of the psyche into a harmonious whole.”

If you are following this liturgical calendar, and are in the Northern hemisphere, summer is about to pass into autumn. Soon harvest time will begin. Perhaps nothing will prepare you for the spiritual harvest better than Love.

Real

True Narratives

I had my season of joy and thanksgiving. It was the first time since my childhood that I had experienced any real happiness. I heard of the old doctor's threats, but they no longer had the same power to trouble me. The darkest cloud that hung over my life had rolled away. Whatever slavery might do to me, it could not shackle my children. If I fell a sacrifice, my little ones were saved. It was well for me that my simple heart believed all that had been promised for their welfare. It is always better to trust than to doubt. [Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Chapter XIX, “The Children Sold”.]

Book narratives:

Here are some narratives illustrating various dark sides of what people call love.

Technical and Analytical Readings

Analytical readings:

Learning Love through experience and practice:

Love's opposites and antagonists:

Photographs

Documentary and Educational Films

Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

On the following morning, at daybreak, Jean Valjean was still by Cosette's bedside; he watched there motionless, waiting for her to wake.  Some new thing had come into his soul.  Jean Valjean had never loved anything; for twenty-five years he had been alone in the world. He had never been father, lover, husband, friend. In the prison he had been vicious, gloomy, chaste, ignorant, and shy. The heart of that ex-convict was full of virginity. His sister and his sister's children had left him only a vague and far-off memory which had finally almost completely vanished; he had made every effort to find them, and not having been able to find them, he had forgotten them. Human nature is made thus; the other tender emotions of his youth, if he had ever had any, had fallen into an abyss.  When he saw Cosette, when he had taken possession of her, carried her off, and delivered her, he felt his heart moved within him.  All the passion and affection within him awoke, and rushed towards that child. He approached the bed, where she lay sleeping, and trembled with joy. He suffered all the pangs of a mother, and he knew not what it meant; for that great and singular movement of a heart which begins to love is a very obscure and a very sweet thing.  Poor old man, with a perfectly new heart!  Only, as he was five and fifty, and Cosette eight years of age, all that might have been love in the whole course of his life flowed together into a sort of ineffable light.  It was the second white apparition which he had encountered. The Bishop had caused the dawn of virtue to rise on his horizon; Cosette caused the dawn of love to rise. [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume II – Cosette; Book Fourth – The Gorbeau Hovel, Chapter III, “Two Misfortunes Make One Piece of Good Fortune”.]

I do not believe that there is anything sweeter in the world than the ideas which awake in a mother’s heart at the sight of her child’s tiny shoe; especially if it is a shoe for festivals, for Sunday, for baptism, the shoe embroidered to the very sole, a shoe in which the infant has not yet taken a step. That shoe has so much grace and daintiness, it is so impossible for it to walk, that it seems to the mother as though she saw her child. She smiles upon it, she kisses it, she talks to it; she asks herself whether there can actually be a foot so tiny; and if the child be absent, the pretty shoe suffices to place the sweet and fragile creature before her eyes. She thinks she sees it, she does see it, complete, living, joyous, with its delicate hands, its round head, its pure lips, its serene eyes whose white is blue. If it is in winter, it is yonder, crawling on the carpet, it is laboriously climbing upon an ottoman, and the mother trembles lest it should approach the fire. If it is summer time, it crawls about the yard, in the garden, plucks up the grass between the paving-stones, gazes innocently at the big dogs, the big horses, without fear, plays with the shells, with the flowers, and makes the gardener grumble because he finds sand in the flower-beds and earth in the paths. Everything laughs, and shines and plays around it, like it, even the breath of air and the ray of sun which vie with each other in disporting among the silky ringlets of its hair. The shoe shows all this to the mother, and makes her heart melt as fire melts wax.  But when the child is lost, these thousand images of joy, of charms, of tenderness, which throng around the little shoe, become so many horrible things. The pretty broidered shoe is no longer anything but an instrument of torture which eternally crushes the heart of the mother. It is always the same fibre which vibrates, the tenderest and most sensitive; but instead of an angel caressing it, it is a demon who is wrenching at it. [Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, or, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), Volume II, Book Eighth, Chapter V, “The Mother”.]

“You’ve cut off your hair?” asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.  “Cut it off and sold it,” said Della. “Don’t you like me just as well, anyhow? I’m me without my hair, ain’t I?”  Jim looked about the room curiously.  “You say your hair is gone?” he said, with an air almost of idiocy.  “You needn’t look for it,” said Della. “It’s sold, I tell you—sold and gone, too. It’s Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered,” she went on with sudden serious sweetness, “but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?”  Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year—what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.  Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.  “Don’t make any mistake, Dell,” he said, “about me. I don’t think there’s anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you’ll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first.”  White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.  For there lay The Combs—the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims—just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.  But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: “My hair grows so fast, Jim!” [O’Henry, “The Gift of the Magi” (1905).]

In the next story, a young man has been discovered to be in love with the king’s daughter. A favorite sport of the king is to put someone in an arena, and allow him to choose to open one of two doors. Behind one door is a beautiful young woman to whom he will be married. Behind the other door is a tiger, who will kill him. In the story, a woman other than the king’s daughter is behind one door. The king’s daughter can communicate to her lover which door to open.

How often, in her waking hours and in her dreams, had she started in wild horror, and covered her face with her hands as she thought of her lover opening the door on the other side of which waited the cruel fangs of the tiger!  But how much oftener had she seen him at the other door! How in her grievous reveries had she gnashed her teeth, and torn her hair, when she saw his start of rapturous delight as he opened the door of the lady! How her soul had burned in agony when she had seen him rush to meet that woman, with her flushing cheek and sparkling eye of triumph; when she had seen him lead her forth, his whole frame kindled with the joy of recovered life; when she had heard the glad shouts from the multitude, and the wild ringing of the happy bells; when she had seen the priest, with his joyous followers, advance to the couple, and make them man and wife before her very eyes; and when she had seen them walk away together upon their path of flowers, followed by the tremendous shouts of the hilarious multitude, in which her one despairing shriek was lost and drowned!  Would it not be better for him to die at once, and go to wait for her in the blessed regions of semi-barbaric futurity?  And yet, that awful tiger, those shrieks, that blood!  Her decision had been indicated in an instant, but it had been made after days and nights of anguished deliberation. She had known she would be asked, she had decided what she would answer, and, without the slightest hesitation, she had moved her hand to the right.  The question of her decision is one not to be lightly considered, and it is not for me to presume to set myself up as the one person able to answer it. And so I leave it with all of you: Which came out of the opened door,—the lady, or the tiger? [Frank R. Stockton, “The Lady, or the TIger?” (1882).]

Novels and stories:

Poetry

Poems:

From the shadow side:

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Quintessentially Romantic, Johannes Brahms’ Violin Sonatas sound like someone in love, or like a parent’s Love for a child, or a spiritual master’s Love for all sentient beings. The first sonata is especially violin-heavy but as Brahms matured, he gave the piano more of an equal role. The three have been frequently recorded as a set, most notably by Szeryng & Rubinstein in 1962; Suk & Katchen in 1966; Perlman & Ashkenazy in 1985; Dumay & Pires in 1992 (No. 1; No. 2; No. 3); Mullova & Anderszewski in 1996; Znaider & Bronfman in 2005 (No. 1; No. 2; No. 3); Jackiw & Levinson in 2009; Roth & Gallardo in 2011; Sergey & Lusine Khachatryan in 2012; Tetzlaff & Vogt 2016; Liebeck & Apekisheva in 2010; and Wallin & Pöntinen in 2019 (Sonata No. 1), and in 2020 (Sonata Nos. 2 & 3).

Franz Schubert, Piano Sonata No. 13 in A Major, Op. 120, D. 664 (1819 or 1825) (approx. 21-26’) (recordings) “was composed in 1819 when Schubert was on holiday in Steyr in Upper Austria. He wrote to his brother Ferdinand that the surrounding countryside was ‘unimaginably lovely’; whether the pastoral nature of this music was inspired by the scenery where Schubert was staying is unknown, but the sonata as a whole displays an engaging sense of enchantment and amiability.” “The manuscript . . . was dedicated to 18-year-old Josephine von Koller of Steyr in Upper Austria, whom he considered to be ‘very pretty’ and ‘a good pianist’. The lyrical, buoyant, in spots typically poignant nature of this sonata fits the image of a young Schubert in love, living in a summery Austrian countryside . . .” The gentleness of the work makes it about Loving, not merely amore.

In Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot (completed 1926) (approx. 114-132’) (libretto) (list of recorded performances), a princess was killed by a suitor, leading a royal family to cruel practices for suitors of other princesses. A hero appears, and pursues his beloved princess despite the risks. His name remains a secret until the end: it is Love. The opera is about Love as a creative force, and how Love opens the way to trust and Faith. Here are links to complete performances conducted by Previtali, Mehta, Chailly, and Maazel. Top audio-recorded performances are by: Cigna, Merli, Olivero & Neroni (Ghione) in 1938; Borkh, del Monaco, Tebaldi & Zaccaria (Erede) in 1955; Callas, Schwarzkopf, Nessi & Zaccaria (Serafin) in 1957; Nilsson, Tebaldi, Bjorling & Tozzi (Leinsdorf) in 1959; Nilsson, Corelli, Moffo & Giaiotti (Stokowski) in 1961; Nilsson, Corelli, Scotto & Giaiotti (Molinari-Pradelli) in 1965; Sutherland, Caballé, Pavarotti & Ghiaurov (Mehta) in 1972; and Radvanovsky, Kaufman & Jaho (Pappano) in 2022.

Richard Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow), Op. 65, TrV 234 (1915) (approx. 191-204’) (list of recorded performances), is about a woman who forgoes her shadow existence to marry. The spiritual transformation, and true marriage are complete when she regains her shadow form (video-recorded performance conducted by Gergiev). Top audio-recorded performances are conducted by Kempe in 1954, Böhm in 1977, Sawallisch in 1987, Solti in 1989-1991, Sinopoli in 1996, and Thielemann in 2020.

Claudio Monteverdi, L’incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppaea), SV 308 (1643) (approx. 165-259’) (list of recorded performances), is an opera about the power of Love to overcome fate; in the opera, it is also more powerful than virtue. Performances are conducted by Christie, Minkowski and Vartolo. Garrido conducted a top recording.

Jean-Baptiste Lully, Psyché, LWV 56 (1678) (approx. 143-173’) (list of recorded performances), is an opera about the mythical figure Psyché, drawn from a play by Molière. It illustrates Love as a creative force, overcoming jealousy (personified by the character Venus). Psyché and Cupid succeed, through their Love for each other. Though decidedly a product of an earlier century, this opera and its core story illustrate the point. Top recorded performances are conducted by O’Dette in 2008, and Rousset in 2023.

Other major works:

Beethoven’s nine symphonies represent many spiritual qualities but under George Szell’s direction, with the Cleveland Orchestra of the late 1950s, they sound like Love. He brings a tenderness to the performances not heard under any other conductor.

Other works:

Albums and tracks:

Music: songs and other short pieces

Visual Arts

Film and Stage

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