Our
little country church recently had a focus lesson on
what it really means to love, with the emphasis on agape’, the love that Jesus
taught His disciples about caring love.
So all my thoughts have driven me back to rediscover the marvelous
miracles of how agape love teaches us how to truly live. Leo Buscaglia,
the professor who lectured us
in the 1970s on the wonders of life and love became my pen pal. In a lecture
he entitled The Art of Being
Human, Leo stated: “To me, probably the
most exciting thing in the world is the realization that I have the potential
of being fully human. I can’t be God,
but I can be a fully functioning human being!...You cannot give to anybody in
this world what you do not have. And
therefore you must concentrate on getting. You must become the most beautiful,
sensitive, wondrous, magical, unique, fantastic person in the world to be able
to have all of these things in order to give them away and share them. If I
don’t have wisdom I can only teach my
ignorance. If I don’t have joy I can
only teach you despair. If I don’t have freedom I can only put you in
cages. But everything that I have I can
give away. That’s the only reason for
having it. He quotes Leo Rosten: ‘In some way, however small
and secret, each of us is a
little mad. Everyone is lonely at the bottom and cries to be understood. But we
can never entirely understand someone else. Each of us remains part stranger,
even to those who love us. It is the weak who are cruel; Gentleness is expected
only from the strong. Those who do not know fear are not really brave, for
courage is the capacity to confront what can be imagined. You can understand
people better if you look
at them,-- No matter how old or impressive they may be – as if they are
children. For most of us are never mature, we simply grow taller. Happiness
comes only when we push our brains
and hearts to the farthest reaches of which we are capable. The purpose of
life is to matter, to
count, to stand for something.” ...Leo continues:”Oh,
learn to risk
again. Go back to that point in
childhood where the whole world was a gigantic, wondrous mystery that you had
to understand. Get hooked on it. Say
to yourself, ‘I want to know everything,
and there isn’t time in life to do it all, so I’ve got to do it now.’
Value every moment as if it really is your
last because it might very well be.”...Don’t wait until tomorrow to tell
somebody you love them. Do it now.
“Yours
is a unique…wondrous history. Love it and embrace it. Reinvent forgiveness. You are never going to be able to
choose life
until you learn to forgive! You forgive
people who have done ill to you by learning to forgive them and saying, ‘It’s
all right.’ Because if you don’t, you carry those things on your back like dead
albatrosses, and they weigh you down.
When you learn to forgive, and when you learn grace again, you can cut
those weights free, and all those energies you use to keep those things in
check can now be used to help you grow and become beautiful…Let it go. Learn
from it and let it go….To choose life,
we must be willing to risk again and love again. Can you think of anything more
important? What do we suffer for? What
do we hope for? It’s love.
It’s life. To miss it will always
be your greatest loss. But if you are willing
to risk, to be hurt, to suffer, you will know love….We’ve got to make our peace
with death in order to choose life, because death is an incredibly good
friend. It tells us that we don’t have
forever…It tells us not to waste time.
It tells us to grow, it tells us to become! It tells us to tell each
other right now that
we love each other....
We’re
never told what life really is. We’re not told that life is also pain,
misery, despair, unhappiness and tears.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to miss any of it. I
want to embrace life, and I want to find
out what it’s all about. I wouldn’t want
to go through life without knowing what it is to cry. That’s why I have
lachrymal ducts. If I wasn’t meant to cry…It’s all right to
cry a little bit. I always find that
tears clear my eyes....Being hurt occasionally can spice up your life. When
you’re crying, you’re at least
alive. Pain is better than nothing. We
need to reach out, we need to bring in, we
need not to be afraid. To love is to risk
not being loved in return....To live is to risk dying. To hope is to risk despair
and to try is to
risk failure. But risks must be taken,
because the greatest risk in life is to risk nothing. The person who risks nothing,
does nothing,
has nothing, is nothing, and becomes nothing.
He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn and feel
and change and grow and love and live....
Only the person who risks is truly free....”
Sarah
Patton Boyle in her book The Desegregated Heart,
also taught me the deeper meaning of agape love; “Every endeavor, every
relationship glows,
lives, is magically new when love is added.”, she wrote...”But the words ‘I
love you,’ spoken or heard when you yourself are experiencing them to the full
are extravagantly exciting, incredibly, creatively new. In them the world is
reborn for you. And in the words ‘God is love,’
experienced by you in the only way they can be fully experienced, in poverty of
spirit, you are reborn....As I pondered them, a fresh world picture dimly
formed before me. What would it be like
to live in such a world? – A world in which I looked to God for all the
wondrous, warm responses I had once sought in man? What if I believed in God
with the vitality
of conviction which once characterized my belief in man? What would happen to
my inner being if I
loved God with the same outpouring of faith, admiration, fellowship,
identification, and tenderness which once I felt for certain people?...Someday
I should be able to love again, and this time my love would be stored ‘where
moth and rust doth not corrupt.’...I knew that from starting from the premise God
is love no
life I remade for myself, no inner world I reconstructed, and no outer world I
strove to realize could be without purpose, meaning, and worth....Of three
things we can be sure: We must die; we
have betrayed the Vision; we are fools.
If a man thinks he can escape any of these fates, the more fool he. Never
the question, ‘Will, or will I not be a
fool?’ It is, What will I be a fool
over?’ On the numerous occasions when each has found himself foolish, how often
had we a purpose which gave meaning to our humiliation? When the lawyer asked
how he could inherit
eternal life, Jesus said to love God and man, then added, ‘This do, and thou
shalt live.’ If we will not be fools
for love, we choose death, not merely for the dim future, but for the eternal
now.”V