All About Love

by bell hooks

  True love is a different story. When it happens, individuals usually feel in touch with each other’s core identity. Embarking on such a relationship is frightening precisely because we feel there is no place to hide. We are known. All the ecstacy that we feel emerges as this love nurtures us and challenges us to grow and transform. Describing true love, Eric Butterworth writes: “True love is a peculiar kind of insight through which we see the wholeness which the person is—at the same time totally accepting the level on which he now expresses himself—without any delusion that the potential is a present reality. True love accepts the person who now is without qualifications, but with a sincere and unwavering commitment to help him to achieve his goals of self-unfoldment—which we may see better than he does.” Most of the time, we think that love means just accepting the other person as they are. Who among us has not learned the hard way that we cannot change someone, mold them and make them into the ideal beloved we might want them to be. Yet when we commit to true love, we are committed to being changed, to being acted upon by the beloved in a way that enables us to be more fully self-actualized. This commitment to change is chosen. It happens by mutual agreement. Again and again in conversations the most common vision of true love I have heard shared was one that declared it to be “unconditional.” True love is unconditional, but to truly flourish it requires an ongoing commitment to constructive struggle and change.

  The heartbeat of true love is the willingness to reflect on one’s actions, and to process and communicate this reflection with the loved one. As Welwood puts it: “Two beings who have a soul connection want to engage in a full, free-ranging dialogue and commune with each other as deeply as possible.” Honesty and openness is always the foundation of insightful dialogue. Most of us have not been raised in homes where we have seen two deeply loving grown folks talking together. We do not see this on television or at the movies. And how can any of us communicate with men who have been told all their lives that they should not express what they feel. Men who want to love and do not know how must first come to voice, must learn to let their hearts speak—and then to speak truth. Choosing to be fully honest, to reveal ourselves, is risky. The experience of true love gives us the courage to risk.

  As long we are afraid to risk we cannot know love. Hence the truism: “Love is letting go of fear.” Our hearts connect with lots of folks in a lifetime but most of us will go to our graves with no experience of true love. This is in no way tragic, as most of us run the other way when true love comes near. Since true love sheds light on those aspects of ourselves we may wish to deny or hide, enabling us to see ourselves clearly and without shame, it is not surprising that so many individuals who say they want to know love turn away when such love beckons.

  NO MATTER HOW often we turn our minds and hearts away—or how stubbornly we refuse to believe in its magic—true love exists. Everyone wants it, even those who claim to have given up hope. But not everyone is ready. True love appears only when our hearts are ready. A few years ago I was sick and had one of those cancer scares where the doctor tells you if the tests are positive you will not have long to live. Hearing his words I lay there thinking, I could not possibly die because I am not ready, I have not known true love. Right then I committed myself to opening my heart; I was ready to receive such love. And it came.

  This relationship did not last forever, and that was difficult to face. All the romantic lore of our culture has told us when we find true love with a partner it will continue. Yet this partnership lasts only if both parties remain committed to being loving. Not everyone can bear the weight of true love. Wounded hearts turn away from love because they do not want to do the work of healing necessary to sustain and nurture love. Many men, especially, often turn away from true love and choose relationships in which they can be emotionally withholding when they feel like it but still receive love from someone else. Ultimately, they choose power over love. To know and keep true love we have to be willing to surrender the will to power.

  When one knows a true love, the transformative force of that love lasts even when we no longer have the company of the person with whom we experienced profound mutual care and growth. Thomas Merton writes: “We discover our true selves in love.” Many of us are not ready to accept and embrace our true selves, particularly when living with integrity alienates us from our familiar worlds. Often, when we undergo a process of self-recovery, for a time we may find ourselves more alone. Writing about choosing solitude over company that does not nurture one’s soul, Maya Angelou reminds us that “it is never lonesome in Babylon.” Fear of facing true love may actually lead some individuals to remain in situations of lack and unfulfillment. There they are not alone, they are not at risk.

  To love fully and deeply puts us at risk. When we love we are changed utterly. Merton asserts: “Love affects more than our thinking and our behavior toward those we love. It transforms our entire life. Genuine love is a personal revolution. Love takes your ideas, your desires, and your actions and welds them together in one experience and one living reality which is a new you.” We often are in flight from the “new you.” Richard Bach’s autobiographical love story Illusions describes both his flight from love and his return. To return to love he had to be willing to sacrifice and surrender, to let go of the fantasy of being someone with no sustained emotional needs to acknowledge his need to love and be loved. We sacrifice our old selves in order to be changed by love and we surrender to the power of the new self.

  Love within the context of romantic bonding offers us the unique chance to be transformed in a welcoming celebratory atmosphere. Without “falling in love,” we can recognize that moment of mysterious connection between our soul and that of another person as love’s attempt to call us back to our true selves. Intensely connecting with another soul, we are made bold and courageous. Using that fearless will to bond and connect as a catalyst for choosing and committing ourselves to love, we are able to love truly and deeply, to give and receive a love that lasts, a love that is “stronger than death.”

  Eleven

  Loss: Loving into Life and Death

  You have to trust that every friendship has no end, that a communion of saints exists among all those, living and dead, who have truly loved God and one another. You know from experience how real this is. Those you have loved deeply and who have died live on in you, not just as memories but as real presences.

  —HENRI NOUWEN

  LOVE MAKES US feel more alive. Living in a state of lovelessness we feel we might as well be dead; everything within us is silent and still. We are unmoved. “Soul murder” is the term psychoanalysts use to describe this state of living death. It echoes the biblical declaration that “anyone who does not know love is still in death.” Cultures of domination court death. Hence the ongoing fascination with violence, the false insistence that it is natural for the strong to prey upon the weak, for the more powerful to prey upon the powerless. In our culture the worship of death is so intense it stands in the way of love. On his deathbed Erich Fromm asked a beloved friend why we prefer love of death to love of life, why “the human race prefers necrophilia to biophilia.” Coming from Fromm this question was merely rhetorical, as he had spent his life explaining our cultural failure to fully embrace the reality that love gives life meaning.

  Unlike love, death will touch us all at some point in our lives. We will witness the death of others or we will witness our own dying, even if it’s just in that brief instance when life is fading away. Living with lovelessness is not a problem we openly and readily complain about. Yet the reality that we will all die generates tremendous concern, fear, and worry. It may very well be that the worship of death, indicated by the constant spectacles of dying we watch on television screens daily, is one way our culture tries to still that fear, to conquer it, to make us comfortable. Writing about the meaning of death in contemporary culture Thomas Merton explains: “Psychoanalysis has taught us something about the death wish that pervades the modern world. We
discover our affluent society to be profoundly addicted to the love of death. . . . In such a society, though much may officially be said about human values, whenever there is, in fact, a choice between the living and the dead, between men and money, or men and power, or men and bombs, the choice will always be for death, for death is the end or the goal of life.” Our cultural obsession with death consumes energy that could be given to the art of loving.

  The worship of death is a central component of patriarchal thinking, whether expressed by women or men. Visionary theologians see the failure of religion as one reason our culture remains death centered. In his work Original Blessing, Matthew Fox explains: “Western civilization has preferred love of death to love of life to the very extent that its religious traditions have preferred redemption to creation, sin to ecstasy, and individual introspection to cosmic awareness and appreciation.” For the most part, patriarchal perspectives have shaped religious teaching and practice. Recently, there has been a turning away from these teachings toward a creation-grounded spirituality that is life-affirming. Fox calls this “the via positiva”: “Without this solid grounding in creation’s powers we become bored, violent people. We become necrophiliacs in love with death and the powers and principalities of death.” We move away from this worship of death by challenging patriarchy, creating peace, working for justice, and embracing a love ethic.

  Ironically, the worship of death as a strategy for coping with our underlying fear of death’s power does not truly give us solace. It is deeply anxiety producing. The more we watch spectacles of meaningless death, of random violence and cruelty, the more afraid we become in our daily lives. We cannot embrace the stranger with love for we fear the stranger. We believe the stranger is a messenger of death who wants our life. This irrational fear is an expression of madness if we think of madness as meaning we are out of touch with reality. Even though we are more likely to be hurt by someone we know than a stranger, our fear is directed toward the unknown and the unfamiliar. That fear brings with it intense paranoia and a constant obsession with safety. The growing number of gated communities in our nation is but one example of the obsession with safety. With guards at the gate, individuals still have bars and elaborate internal security systems. Americans spend more than thirty billion dollars a year on security. When I have stayed with friends in these communities and inquired as to whether all the security is in response to an actual danger I am told “not really,” that it is the fear of threat rather than a real threat that is the catalyst for an obsession with safety that borders on madness.

  Culturally we bear witness to this madness every day. We can all tell endless stories of how it makes itself known in everyday life. For example, an adult white male answers the door when a young Asian male rings the bell. We live in a culture where without responding to any gesture of aggression or hostility on the part of the stranger, who is simply lost and trying to find the correct address, the white male shoots him, believing he is protecting his life and his property. This is an everyday example of madness. The person who is really the threat here is the home owner who has been so well socialized by the thinking of white supremacy, of capitalism, of patriarchy that he can no longer respond rationally.

  White supremacy has taught him that all people of color are threats irrespective of their behavior. Capitalism has taught him that, at all costs, his property can and must be protected. Patriarchy has taught him that his masculinity has to be proved by the willingness to conquer fear through aggression; that it would be unmanly to ask questions before taking action. Mass media then brings us the news of this in a newspeak manner that sounds almost jocular and celebratory, as though no tragedy has happened, as though the sacrifice of a young life was necessary to uphold property values and white patriarchal honor. Viewers are encouraged feel sympathy for the white male home owner who made a mistake. The fact that this mistake led to the violent death of an innocent young man does not register; the narrative is worded in a manner that encourages viewers to identify with the one who made the mistake by doing what we are led to feel we might all do to “protect our property at all costs from any sense of perceived threat.” This is what the worship of death looks like.

  All the worship of death we see on our television screens, all the death we witness daily, does not prepare us in any way to face dying with awareness, clarity, or peace of mind. When worship of death is rooted in fear it does not enable us to live fully or well. Merton contends: “If we become obsessed with the idea of death hiding and waiting for us in ambush, we are not making death more real but life less real. Our life is divided against itself. It becomes a tug of war between the love and the fear of itself. Death then operates in the midst of life, not as the end of life, but rather, as the fear of life.” To live fully we would need to let go of our fear of dying. That fear can only be addressed by the love of living. We have a long history in this nation of believing that to be too celebratory is dangerous, that being optimistic is fool-hardy, hence our difficulty in celebrating life, in teaching our children and ourselves how to love life.

  Many of us come to love life only when faced with life-threatening illness. Certainly, facing the possibility of my own death gave me the courage to confront the lack of love in my life. Much contemporary visionary work on death and dying has highlighted learning how to love. Loving makes it possible for us to change our worship of death to a celebration of life. In an unsent letter written to a true love in my life I wrote: “During the memorial service for her sister my friend gave testimony in which she declared ‘death has left us loving her completely.’ We are so much more able to embrace the loss of intimate loved ones and friends when we know that we have given our all—when we have shared with them that mutual recognition and belonging in love which death can never change or take away. Each day I am grateful for having known a love that enables me to embrace death with no fear of incompleteness or lack, with no sense of irredeemable regret. That is a gift you gave. I cherish it; nothing changes its value. It remains precious.” Loving does this. Love empowers us to live fully and die well. Death becomes, then, not an end to life but a part of living.

  In her autobiography, The Wheel of Life, published shortly after her death, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross tells the story of her awakening to the realization that we can face death without fear: “In these earliest days of what would become known as the birth of thanatology—or the study of death—my greatest teacher was a black cleaning woman. I do not remember her name . . . but what drew my attention to her was the effect she had on many of the most seriously ill patients. Each time she left their rooms, there was, I noticed, a tangible difference in their attitudes. I wanted to know her secret. Desperately curious, I literally spied on this woman who had never finished high school but knew a big secret.” The secret that this wise black woman knew, which Kübler-Ross positively appropriated, was that we must befriend death and let it be our guide in life, meeting it unafraid. When the black cleaning lady who had triumphed over many hardships in her own life, who had lost loved ones to early deaths, entered the rooms of the dying she brought with her a willingness to talk openly about death without fear. This nameless angel gave Kübler-Ross the most valuable lesson of her life, telling her: “Death is not a stranger to me. He is an old, old acquaintance.” It takes courage to befriend death. We find that courage in life through loving.

  Our collective fear of death is a dis-ease of the heart. Love is the only cure. Many people approach death with despair because they realize they have not lived their lives as they wanted to. They never found their “true selves” or they never found the love their hearts longed to know. Sometimes, facing death they offer themselves the love they did not offer for most of their lives. They give themselves acceptance, the unconditional love that is the core of self-love. In her foreword to Intimate Death, Marie De Hennezel describes witnessing the way approaching death can enable people to become more fully self-actualized. She writes: “At the moment of utter solitude, when the bo
dy breaks down on the edge of infinity, a separate time begins to run that cannot be measured in any normal way. In the course of several days something happens, with the help of another presence that allows despair and pain to declare themselves, the dying seize hold of their lives, take possession of them, unlock their truth. They discover the freedom of being true to themselves.” This deathbed recognition of love’s power is a moment of ecstasy. We would be lucky if we felt its power all our days and not just when those days are ending.

  When we love every day we do not need the eminent threat of sure death to be true to ourselves. Living with awareness and clarity of mind and heart we are able to embrace the realization of our dying in a manner that allows us to live more fully because we know death is always with us. There is no one among us who is a stranger to death. Our first home in the womb is also a grave where we await the coming of life. Our first experience of living is a moment of resurrection, a movement out of the shadows and into the light. When we watch a child physically coming out of the womb we know we are in the presence of the miraculous.

  Yet it does not take long for us to forget the magical harmony of the transition from death into life. And death soon becomes the passage we want to avoid. But it has become harder for our nation to flee death. Even though, on the average, we have longer life spans, death surrounds us now more than ever, as so many life-threatening diseases take the lives of loved ones, friends, and acquaintances, many of whom are young in years. This strong presence of dying often cannot penetrate our cultural denial that death is always among us, and people still refuse to let an awareness of death guide them.