Hard to Love
We often gain our understanding of love during our embrace of joyful moments and stories of happiness. This is paramount for us to feel love. It inspires us to give love to others during our experiences of joy and happiness and when we notice others missing out on such experiences. We are eager to embrace these warm, positive experiences of which we want to return over and over.
However, we sell ourselves short when we only ever pursue love in this capacity. Loving others becomes more challenging when we experience transgressions against us. Yet, our love can deepen when we forgive such people. Many of us have experienced a new level of love through the process of forgiving those who have harmed us. We may have also grown in our understanding of love by forgiving ourselves through the process of making amends to those we’ve harmed. There’s an enormous amount of freedom found in this kind of love.
Yet, this isn’t the deepest our love can go. The depth of our love for others can always grow deeper. We often repeat popular notions such as, “love knows no bounds”, “love conquers all”, “love is blind”, and “love is kind”. Yet, if we dare acknowledge that there are some with whom we will withhold our love, we potentially open the door to a love that’s deeply painful. By withholding our love, we may unknowingly be justifying our avoidance of loving those that seem unlovable. It is hard to grasp the idea of loving those who are too different from us, who possess traits too evil to understand, or who we think of as soulless and as monsters.
Loving such people requires us to practice a level of empathy that pushes our capacity to feel pain and powerlessness unlike any we’ve ever experienced. This is the rawest form of love because giving love to those who need it most means we witness the pain of others who have either never experienced enough love or who never will. They are a lost cause, at best. We ask ourselves, “Why bother?” or we might convince ourselves that we simply cannot do this. Furthermore, we are often unwilling to love those who’s transgressions fly in the face of who we are at our core and what we most strongly believe in.
Therefore, to charge ourselves with the impossible task of loving the unlovable requires an immense amount of courage and bravery. Doing this may be seen by others as something quite noble and inspirational. However, what makes such an act of love meaningful is that, while it is noble, it is in fact not about being noble. Even with nobility, we often give love with at least some degree of expectancy that our gift will not only be well received and be grateful for, but will permeate far and wide. This expectation greatly diminishes the meaning and purpose of giving our gift. Therefore, to truly give our gift to those unlovable, god forsaken monsters is to subject ourselves to a level of compassion and tenderness on which our heart swells beyond its limits, and aches unlike any heartache we’ve ever experienced.
Having reached a depth of love that few may understand, we now look at the world with a new set of eyes. We are compelled to encourage others to embrace their own exploration of this kind of love because we see clearly how the world would be a better place as a result. Yet, when others do not reach the depth of the love we now possess, it is initially tempting to hold these people in moral contempt and could easily justify the proverbial crucifixion of those who withhold their love in a seemingly hypocritical manner. However, because of the love we now possess, we realize the pain we experience when we encounter the depths of such love. Therefore, we practice compassion and tenderness for those people, too.
We are caught in the balance. On one side, we are protective of those outcasted by society due to their moral or societal transgressions, and we love them; on the other side, we patiently wait for those not yet ready for such depths of love, and we love them because of this, too. Perhaps the most truthful wisdom is that, with others’ opportunities to love monsters, we must still love those who are afraid to do so and withhold their gifts, for they need love too.
We must realize the world is already a better place simply because we alone now know this delicate love. It is best to understand the world is beautiful and wonderful. While there is much sorrow in the world, we would never find the opportunity for joy had there been no sorrow. We all land somewhere on this matrix and we must honor our own process of learning to love beyond our current capacity. We must accept were we are in life while simultaneously becoming a better version of ourselves. One which gives more freely and, hopefully, to those who need love the most.
