Letting love lead us home
to ourselves and one another, because love is all we've got
Let us not tire of preaching love; it is the force that will overcome the world. Let us not tire of preaching love. Though we see that waves of violence succeed in drowning the fire of Christian love, love must win out; it is the only thing that can.
– St. Óscar Romero
I’m writing this final post of 2024 with one of my two-year-old twins snugly asleep in my lap. The house is quiet — her sister is asleep in the other room — and all I hear is my daughter’s breath, slowly rising and falling. This is a particularly poignant place from which to offer today’s reflection, a simple reminder of what lives at the center of A Soulful Revolution:
Love is the heart of this work for change.
I want to use this precious space here at year end to share a few reflections on love that give me clarity and courage in my life and work at the intersection of spiritual transformation and social change. “To love is to act,” Victor Hugo wrote three days before he died — an effective summation of his life’s work. It will surprise no one who frequents this humble publication that my favorite definitions of love are rooted in action.
In her book All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks fleshes out this idea of love as a verb. She roots her powerful treatise in psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s definition of love as “the will to extend one’s self to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”
I remember precisely where I was when I read this passage a decade ago — in a cafe waiting to meet my then-boyfriend-now-husband’s parents for the first time! — because it resonated with my spirit so profoundly. The idea that love is about choosing to stretch out beyond the comfortable bounds of self for the sake of cultivating growth was consistent with my experience of frequently stepping into new communities (geographically, culturally, racially), in my early twenties, and finding myself graciously received by people who chose to love an often-naive newcomer.
This understanding continues to echo within me as this fourth week of Advent unfurls into Christmas.
Love as choice — and particularly as Divine choice — is highlighted by the Christian celebration of the Incarnation — this spiritual stretching from the divine plane into the human experience. God becomes human in order to love us as one of us, and to show us how human being is about being love.
Love is an exercise in continually reaching out to our highest, most loving selves. In this, we are ever-supported by an eternal Love that is reaching out for us.
One of the most impactful mentors I have had is Father Greg Boyle, the Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries, the world’s largest gang-intervention and prison rehabilitation and reentry program. Father Greg likes to say, “Community is the context, but tenderness is the methodology. Otherwise, love stays in the air, or in your head, or even in your heart.”
With my daughter snuggled up in my lap, I couldn’t agree more. Tenderness meets us in our bodies. It shifts love from pie-in-the-sky principle to an everyday way of being in the world. I believe — desperately — in love. But my children test this belief. I put it in action every time I meet their need (often expressed with whining or tears or flailing limbs) with tenderness. I often struggle to do this well. I am being tenderized through practice.
The love that compels us in the cause for justice is our collective beating heart: robustly muscular, yet tenderly vulnerable, its rhythm swayed by compassion toward those who suffer and set racing by the ferocity of injustice.
Love makes us vulnerable. And yet love is what links us together across all manner of difference in social location and life experience.
As hooks puts it in Salvation: Black People and Love,
“Love is profoundly political. Our deepest revolution will come when we understand this truth. Only love can give us the strength to go forward in the midst of heartbreak and misery. Only love can give us the power to reconcile, to redeem, the power to renew weary spirits and save lost souls. The transformative power of love is the foundation of all meaningful social change. Without love our lives are without meaning. Love is the heart of the matter. When all else has fallen away, love sustains.”
I have experienced a lack of love in many movement spaces I have inhabited. It can feel safer to barricade our hearts, to pretend that we are unfazed by the armies of injustice hurtling toward us. But if we do this, we have already lost. We have allowed fear to sever our sense of connection to our hearts, which keep us human.
Love is our greatest asset. When we stay near to love, we keep close to our commitments to human dignity and the flourishing of all life. Practicing tenderness toward ourselves and others is about embodying the world we are working toward, pulling it into the here and now.
As I look ahead to a new year, my prayer is a simple yet vulnerable one:
Oh, Big, Big Love: Loving scares me, sometimes. Would you keep me knowing I’m loved? Keep me tender. Keep me open. Keep me courageous. My friends are scared, too. Would you keep us knowing we’re loved? Keep us heart-heavy. Keep us connected. Keep us human. Because you are love, and for love, and with us in all the labor of loving, forever and always. Amen.
Beloved Soulful Revolutionary, I want you to know: I love you.
I am grateful for your tender heart in this work for just and beautiful social change. I honor your heartbreak. We are connected in our passion, our devastation, our longing, our lament. Your love makes a difference, keeps you human — helps keep all of us human. Thank you for being open to receive love. Thank you for loving.
Thank you, Love.