April 7, 2003
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Spring has taken a step back in my neighborhood. We have cold wet rain falling at the moment. The sound of water dripping off the eaves makes me sleepy. So even though I've been up for a couple of hours, I'm still trying to get my eyes open. Coffee helps, but I'm out of that sinful Amaretto creamer that I like to glob into the cup, so I'm not enjoying it as much as I usually do.
I'm still reading Kiekegaard. SO in the absence of a thought of my own, I'd like to share another passage from his essays. As a reminder, when Kierkegaard speaks of love, he isn't talking about a feeling, but rather a set of behaviors intended to enhance the dignity of the person who is the object of love. Tolerance, respect, compassion, and mercy - all these become acts of love when our design is to lift up, to build up that which Kierkegaard says potentially exists in all persons, the capacity to show tolerance, respect, compassion, and mercy. In this way, he says, love calls forth love.
When Love Is Secure
Only when it is a duty to love is love secured; secured against the ravages of change, eternally and happily secured against despair. However joyous, happy, indescribably confident, instinctive and inclinational, spontaneous and emotional love may be - it still needs to establish itself more securely in the strength of duty. Only in the security of the eternal is all anxiety cast out. For in spontaneous love, however confident it be, there still resides an anxiety, a dread over the possibility of change. Yet in the you shall it is forever decided; one's love is forever secure. Every other love can be changed into something else.
Spontaneous emotional love can be changed, for instance, to its opposite, to hate or by a kind of spontaneous combustion it can become jealousy. From being the greatest happiness it can change into the greatest torment. The heat of spontaneous love is so dangerous - no matter how great its passion - that it can very quickly become a poisonous fever.
Worst of all is how spontaneous love can gradually be changed through the years - as when a fire gradually consumes itself. Human love can lose its ardor, its joy, its desire, its originative power, its living freshness. As with the river which springs out of a rock and disperses farther down in the sluggishness of the dead-waters, so is love exhausted in the luke-warmness and indifference of habit. Of all love's enemies habit is perhaps the most cunning. It is cunning enough never to let itself be seen, for he who sees the habit for what it is, is saved from it. The struggle is within ourselves to see it.
The way of habit changes human-inspired love into something unrecognizable. When we become aware of how habit has changed our love, we long to make up for it, but do not exactly know how. We do not know where we can go to buy new oil to rekindle out love. Then we are liable to despair and to become weary of not ever being able to fan it into flame again. What sadness it is to encounter a poverty-stricken man who had once lived prosperously, and still how much more sorrowful than this to see a human-inspired love changed almost to loathsomeness!
Genuine love, love transformed and sustained by the eternal, however, will never become characterized by habit; habit can never get power over it. To what is said of eternal life, that there is no sighing and no tears, one can add: there is no habit. If you are to save your soul or your love from habit's cunning - though people blindly believe there are all kinds of ways of keeping oneself awake and secure - then you must heed the eternal's you shall. This alone will preserve you. This alone will keep your love alive.
Some of you responded to the last Kierkegaard excerpt by talking saying "Love is a Decision." I think that the above segment agrees with and explains why this definition of 'love' is true. Only by avoiding habit, automatic response to the person we love are we able to keep our love fresh. Habit subtly moves us from seeing the person as he really is to seeing an after image of the person the way he was in a previous encounter. The decision to rise above habit, and to be fully in the moment of each encounter enables us to shed the baggage of long months and years of relationship which have worn us into a stale pattern. Just as the screen saver protects our monitor by spreading the light around, focus on the actual, the real, the present saves us by preventing our behavior from burning to deep in one area of relationship while neglecting another.
As an aside, there is a fabulous little book by Gary Smalley, entitled Love is a Decision. Taking Kierkegaard's premise into family therapy, he gives practical suggestions for shifting your married-love relationship from the ruts of habit into freshness. It's not easy to let go of the past. The tragedy of habit is that it ends in the realization that in spite of years living together you don't know your lover at all. The salvation offered by Kiekegaard's duty, or Smalley's decision is that you constantly monitor and correct your perception so that you are seeing the person as he actually is, not as he was or as you imagine him to be.
I see that the coffee in my cup is growing cold. I believe I'll offer it the dignity of a warm-up.
Comments (12)
o/
God Bless - Dale
How I wish I had read this three years ago... things might have been different in my life..
Thank you... I'm hooked
Bright Blessings Chel
I am still not awake enough to absorb all of this (the rain and time change are playing tricks on us this morning too!)
::sigh:: I am afraid both my parents and hubby's parents have the habit kind of love. The way they speak of each other and quibble over nosensical things, they don't seem to really know each other.
To me, the craziest thing is the fact that real love rarely looks normal (doesn't look like the 'expected.') It's often the difference between being in the "ruts" or the "trenches!"
spring
what's that 
I really like this one - I remember reading something like it while I was in a bookstore.
Yes, Minnesota winters are a matter of life and death! We lived near Minneapolis for five years and "survived" one winter with a day that was sixty degrees blow zero--the whole state shut down. Just a wee bit cold, no?
i lay awake all night listening to rain hit the metal roof, so i'm extremely tired today, too!
i'll have to read me some of that ol' kierkegaard fella.....
I apologize for the addition of the "harmless" descriptor in "harmless hammer". It was not intended to be a quote of your words, but rather a description of what I perceived -- and I should have made that more clear.
All in all, however, I don't think that I did misinterpret your post. Although I do agree there is a difference between striking a person and striking an inanimate object, violence can be present in both situations. Take for example a child with a plastic toy hammer. The child can bang the hammer against, say, a chair just to hear the noise or just because it is fun for him/her ... and that is, IMO, comparative to building a bird house. However, that child can also get upset/angry and begin to strike the chair with the hammer in a temper tantrum ... and that, IMO, is violent behavior that should be curbed. The Nun's intention was vandalism and destruction, not creation. It was violence, IMO, albeit a different kind of violence than they are supposedly protesting. And again, had it been perpetrated by anybody other than a supposed-to-be-spiritual-leader in the Christian Church, the news would have been wide spread and front page, not tucked away and kept hushed ... and the perpetrators would be on the recieving end of scorn from the vast majority.
This may just be a point on which we will have to agree to disagree, however, and that is kewl.
Peace,
Bri
We lived in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota (Northern Suburb of Minneapolis) from approximately 1993 to 1998. This is where we purchased our first home! Can you believe we moved from Southern California to Minneapolis? Shocking.....I had to go buy some socks, and train myself to wear them.
ooHhHhHh hehe thanks!
I'm trying to figger what Bri's point has to do with this blog? Oh well.
Do you know that in some philosophies about teaching state that habitual routines are a must for students. They find security and discipline in classroom constants. I say that's crap. I say habits are behaviors we don't have to think about. Habits are the death of growth. So are habits the death of love. Makes a lot of sense. We don't have to think about stuff, so we don't. And so it goes.
Bri's point has nothing to do with THIS blog, it is part of a conversation about another blog that Q-Mom and I have been having -- and I find it easier to respond to her on her own site.
Speaking of which, as I said Q-Mom, we will just have to agree to disagree. I think that it is very relavent that they are Nuns ... however, I never said that I see them as the embodiement of Christianity, only that they were not acting in the manner Christ taught. The point about Pagans/Athiests was simply to emphasise that had the actions been perpetrated by a Pagan, especially a Pagan Priestess or Priest, there would be no question in most minds that what they did was clearly wrong and deserves to be punished to the fullest extent of the law. But because they are Nuns, many seek instead to absolve their guilt and wash away their deeds with a wave of a hand and a simple "they were only doing as Christ taught" ... only they weren't doing what Christ taught. And that is the only reason I believe it matters that they are Nuns. I have never claimed there are not good and bad in every "rank and file" of every religion and my blog was not an attack on Christianity. It was an attack on those who would use Christianity to cover deeds that, if done by non-Christians, would be immediately pounced upon and declared wrong by any logical rationalle.
Peace,
Bri
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