TO SPEAK OF LOVE
Let us speak of love.
I say, “Let Us” speak of love
because what created us
and what we essentially are
Is Love.
Love is a collective.
We all desire and seek it
due to forgetting our true nature.
It is love that gave human beings
the freedom to choose,
even the freedom to choose
not to love.
This is what makes Love unconditional
and why it forgives us when we stray
from our true nature.
The highest expression of our loving nature
is a form of love known as Agape.
Agape is a Greek word which means
unconditional love, charity of heart,
“to will the good of another.”
This type of love goes beyond
basic self-love with its emphasis on vanity
and selfishness, which is so central to egotism,
and yet, self-love, when experienced as divine
can show us our true nature.
Agape is not Eros,
a Greek word for sexual passion
and the desire for intimacy,
Eros can “help the soul
to recall its inherent knowledge
of ideal beauty and spiritual truth” (Aristotle)
It can also manifest as Platonic love…
where we are able to love
without physical attraction.
Although Agape has been most often
associated with Christianity,
as the love of or for God
(regardless of what concept you may
or may not associate with the word ‘God’)
It is not the exclusive possession
of any religion.
Its purest essence and expression
is not ideological or dogmatic.
Agape is universal
and experienced most powerfully
through its action
and demonstrative impact.
As a dear friend often says,
“Love is a verb”
It is not enough to simply speak of love,
We must demonstrate it through our actions.
Agape is the highest, most complete form
of selfless love.
It is a love for self beyond ego.
It is loving another as oneself,
as the beauty emerging from
the Source of All That Is.
The great brush strokes of Agape love
can be seen throughout Nature
because Nature sacrifices itself
in order to be of true service
to the evolutionary needs of all life.
Our preoccupation with prejudice, war, greed,
fame, power, ideological superiority,
materialistic technocracy, insatiable consumerism
and territorial dominion
leaves our capacity to love castrated.
Through such activity we forget
our innocence and the generosity
of Love’s Grace expressing
the magnanimous nature of all existence,
and the only path to the peace we seek.
Agape love teaches us to transmute
our primal self-absorbed nature,
the complacency of self interest,
moving beyond sentimental love
into an empathic form of tough love,
which coalesces our hearts
into greater cooperative harmony
and pragmatic self-responsibility.
This is just a few of my reflections on Agape;
which encourages me to find my will
to love in ways I may have forgotten
or have rarely seen in this grasping world.
Yet, I am encouraged by how many more people
are awakening to this kind of love now.
May it be so for you as well.
-TruGuy Starhorse
April 21, 2024
