arounderic

I love you.

I should add that I also really love tacos. Nothing against you personally, but tacos just have my heart. There’s just something about corn tortillas with Mexican herbs and spices that just really gets me going.

It is strange through, that we use the same word “love” to describe a relationship with so many dimensions. Shouldn’t a word as nuanced as love have as nuanced a context? What [do] we talk about when we talk about love?

I’d like to talk a little about a story of love, and divine whether there is a way that we can differentiate types of love, and finally I’d like to give an exercise – a mental challenge- for those of you who meditate or who want to feel or give more love in your life.

My grandfather lived to be 106. 106! When he was a boy there were still horses and carriages traveling along San Francisco streets, unironically! When he was 102 however, he had a heart attack. It was right before Covid, and all the family flew in from across the country. If you’ve ever been in this situation, you know what it’s like; thinking that this may be the last time you ever get to see a loved one. What do you say to them in their fragile state? We went with “I love you.”

Instead of giving back a pre-packaged “I love you too” back, he became fixated on this phrase. He would pause and say

You know, people say “I love you too much.” I suppose I am very fond of you – or affectionate towards you – but in a very different way than I loved my wife Helen”. No, people say I love you too much.

Some of the family didn’t know how to take this and thought he was actually saying “don’t say ‘I love you’” because he didn’t love them! Of course this wasn’t true. Him and I spent the next four years periodically discussing love, what it meant and the proper context to say it. But it wasn’t after his passing that I learned about the Greeks.

The Greek language has [at lease] four distinct ways to say “I love you”:

Philia: Which is where we get the city Philadelphia from and it is where we get the feelings of brotherly love, fraternity, & friendship.

The second is called Storge (pronounced “stor-jay”) and this describes the familial love that you get from a brother, sister, or someone who you have seen change and grow over such a long period of time.

Third is Eros love , which is a bodily, physical, and sensual love. It is where we get the word erotic from.

The three of these forms of love can change as a relationship develops over time. For example, I could fall in love with a co-worker and my Philia love transforms into Eros love, but after 20 years of marriage, that eros love turns into storge love.

The fourth form of love however, transcends all others. It was developed after the Greeks who wrote the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the biblical text) to describe the love of Christ. This is Agape.

Agape is not something that “happens to you” the same way you might “fall in love” instead it is active, action oriented, and intentional. It is the willfulness to improve the wellbeing of another who couldn’t possibly do anything to benefit you. It is especially active when another is actively trying to ruin your peace.

A modern example of this is the Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh. When the People’s Republic of China annexed the country of Tibet, he, along with many others were imprisoned and worse. However when he wrote about his experience later it wasn’t a fear of his treatment that he was so concerned about it, rather it was the fear that he would loose compassion for his captors. By devoting a lifetime to cultivating loving-kindness to all living beings how do you maintain that when someone wants to exterminate you? He would visualize his captors as children – no more than 10 years old- and ruminate on the thoughts, fears, innocence, and desires for affection that every child has. It maintained their humanity and his compassion.

It has been a year since my grandfather died and I find myself thinking about these things more and more; maybe it’s because of the anniversary of his death, or because it is an election year, or because I feel that those who have given themselves the task to define the future lack imagination, love and compassion, whatever the reason I am thinking more about love than ever before .

So how do you show and talk about love? Whether it is philia, storge, eros, or you practice agape, make sure that the words you use are specific, but more than specificity, that your actions speak louder than words.