TOW: The Power of Love

No, this isn't a Huey Lewis and the News Song.

Again, I think because I've been going on dates, and also because it's something more serious about things I'm reading lately, I'm starting to think about what it means to love other people, and how I love other people.

Today's quote from Plato on love:  "Love is a serious mental disease."

And, in a way, Plato was right.  (But when isn't Plato right?)   Love is like a (sometimes) happy infection, spreading through our mind, and at times our bodies, awakening feelings in us that didn't exist before, or making us feel in ways we don't always normally feel.  Love is not easy, and love is messy at times.  But more than anything loves moves us to do things, to say things, and act in certain ways that we never imagined we would, could, or perhaps should.

Love is something that moves us, and St. Thomas Aquinas talks a lot about this when he talks about the way the First Mover (or God) loves the world.  God was moved by love to create.  He was in a relationship with the world that was to come to be, and he just sort of moved towards it, and created all things living and things in the universe.  It's an interesting idea.

And from these ideas is where I have been putting a lot of my thought lately.  Love is something that interrupts us, that moves us in an unexpected, but often good direction.  Love is not something easy (for movement, as any good physicist would tell you, is not something easy or even 'normal' by physical standards)  because love often interrupts our routines, our needs, and our wants.  But that's a good thing--because love takes us to places we don't want to be--it takes us outside of ourselves, outside of our little backyard of our minds, and into the wider world, where people need us.  And love answers our own needs by serving others, and by being present to the love that's needed in the world. 

It's a powerful thing when you think about it.