Recently I ran across this picture: It fascinated me!
Take a moment and look at it: what do you see!?
It is so gentle, light, careful, attentive, considerate...
It's evidently a picture of a heart.
But it's also a multitude of simple lines - nothing more. Thin thin lines that could almost be transparent... Only one of them would not mean anything but the gentle dance of lines form this intricate heart...
This seems to perfectly capture what love truly is.
It made me WONDER: What is love?
We throw this word around so often in our everyday life, but do we even know or fully realize what it actually means!? What are those elements that love is made of, like the lines that created this image?
The obvious (and beautiful!!) answer could be by St.Paul when he 'sings' the Hymn of Love (1Corinthians 13:4-8):
Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous;
love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered,
does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth;
bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never fails;
However true and beautiful these words are (and they most certainly are both!!), they seem to answer the question of HOW love is (or should be) and not WHAT love is.
The lines of the image are gentle, kind, attentive, humble... but they are lines.
So what are the lines, the elements, that constitute love? LOVE is act, action!
The more I thought about it, the more it became clear to me:
Love is not primarily an emotion, a sensation, butterflies in your tummy, a warm feeling in your heart... It's not an abstract, subjective thing!! It's concrete, clear and grounded, it's objective and evident and palpable! Love is action!
Love is patient, kind... ACTION.
BUT it's action with a specific intent: that of loving.
This sounds circular, but it actually isn't!
Love is action, like that heart is made of lines. But it's not any kind of action! It's action with the intent of loving: The lines are not any kind of random lines! They are lines with the intent to form a heart!
That's why Saint Paul started his Hymn of Love by saying (1Corinthians 13:1-3):
If I speak with the tongues of men
and of angels, but do not have love,
I have become a noisy gong or a
clanging cymbal.
If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all
knowledge;
and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do
not have love, I am nothing.
And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender
my body to be burned,
but do not have love, it profits me nothing.
Action without love is nothing.
AND
Love without action is nothing.
The same action can be done out of duty, necessity, custom... then it's just an action.
But if that same action is truly done out of love, it gains a new dimension and value! It becomes LOVE, not just an expression of love, an act of love, but LOVE itself as such!
The intent thus becomes the defining moment of action and the defining aspect of what love truly is.
Just as in the picture: The lines are the components. But it's not the lines as such that form the heart. It's the composition of the lines, their intent so to speak, that makes them become what they truly are: a heart.
In the same way, our actions become love not because they are actions and thus the 'material' of love. But because they are done out of the intent of loving this material gets the 'form' of love and only then becomes love.
And as we see in the picture: the 'material' of it is the lines but it is also the non-lines between the lines! They too are a constitutional part of the image!
The same way it's with love too:
the positive AND the negative;
the right thing AND the mistake;
the big gestures and life-changing moments AND the invisible silent unnoticed ones;
the strong big important AND the gentle hair-thin and almost invisible;
the joy AND the pain;
the obvious understood and meaningful AND the enigmatic incomprehensible;
...
It's all part of love!
It's all part of the picture!
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