Learning to love

A few more things to contemplate from a sage...Eugene Peterson...

"We learn how to love by being loved. Love is not built into our genes. A lot of very essential things in human life take place without learning or practice: We breathe, our hearts pump and circulate our blood, our sucking reflexes are fully developed when we come out of the womb, we kick and wave and scream, we cuddle and sleep and coo, all without schooling or training.

As we develop genetically, things come into play that do require teaching and training: reading and writing, social skills, artistic and athletic competence, emotional and relational understandings, how to repair a transmission, how to program a computer, how to get to the moon. At the top of these learned behaviors, these achieved identities, is love.

Everyone more or less knows this, but after we've reached the age of thirty or so, having failed at it so many times, it seems so out of reach that many of us settle for a human identity that is more accessible--like one associated with playing the violin, or playing a ten-handicap golf game, or repairing a transmission, or getting to the moon. When we run into John's (biblical writer) barrage of sentences on love, it just doesn't seem very practical. We shrug our shoulders and say, "Well, I've tried it, tried it a lot. I don't seem to be very good at it, and the friends I've tried it on don't seem to be very good at it either. How about something a little more down-to-earth."

But John won't be deterred. He says, in effect, "This is about as down-to-earth as you can get. Don't you remember hearing the Word became flesh and dwelt among us...Isn't dwelt among us down to earth? And God so loved the world that he gave...isn't world down-to-earth? You are the one he loves, and this world is the ground on which he loves you. I'm not putting anything alien or ill-fitting on you. This is who you are, your identity, loved by God. But being loved is not all there is to it. Being loved creates a person who can love, who must love. Getting love is a launch into giving love."