We need to talk about Love

We need to talk about Love.  Love as the defining force of our lives, and of the world. Love as the driver of the higher order thinking we need to effect change in this world.  Love as the only foundation of all the issues our world is confronting right now.

We need to ensure each decision we make, whether those that affect our own lives, the lives of our families and communities, and those of the world at large, are informed by Love.   We need to get beyond partisan politics, who said what and what wasn’t said, who was right and who was wrong, and let Love speak – and DO! – for itself.

We need to talk honestly about what’s happening in the world.   How hate and fear is threatening to eat away at humanity’s progress.  We can no longer smokescreen around the issues that are emerging and couch them in purely economic, political, environmental or geographical terms, rationalising away the choices that have been made based on human need.  We need to ensure that each decision we make is ‘rooted and grounded in Love’. And acknowledge our responsibility to make sure our choices are always those based in Love. We need to be ‘extremists for Love’[1].

Love is, and always has been, the greatest force available to mankind.  Fossil fuels, solar power, political and economic power are nothing when we see that the biggest drivers in each of our lives can and must stem from love.  The love a mother has for her child, a partner for a spouse, the love in our families (however imperfect that might be), the love we share with others for a cause or a vision, the love we have for ourselves and our highest vision of what we can be.  Yes to a love for your country if that’s your thing, but only in so far as it represents the potential of what humanity can be.  And what it can give to others.  Love for good and man still at the centre of being.

We need to acknowledge that every decision we make, as people, partners, wives, husbands, parents, brothers, sister, friends, community leaders, politicians, heads of state, journalists, business people, must be rooted in the larger love for mankind.  Love that doesn’t shirk away from difficult issues to be discussed, or the challenges we face, but always elevates and demands the very highest standards of both ourselves and others.  It is moral decency of course, but it goes beyond that.  It demands of us to not just make a claim for integrity and honesty but expects and requires us to see that in EVERYONE we meet, not just those that seem to be on ‘our’ side.  We need to engage in a way that sees that higher order of love in everyone, not just our friends but, especially, our enemies.

It’s a tall order.  But love we must if we are to survive.  For the survival of our species depends just as much on removing the toxic politics of hate, the degradation of our environment and the breakdown of our societies as it does in the deeper, higher search and claiming of love within each one of us and the channelling of that essence into our highest purpose for our lives.  For that force harnessed correctly will solve all those problems in a flash.

Love IS what drives us.  It is who and what we are.  It is what we are made of, our substance.  It is.  Because we are.  Love.

[1] Martin Luther King