Add Love to your Story as you Give it to Others

“With agape love, a person chooses to love, even when it hurts. In other words, it comes from a free will (we choose it) and from both a good will (we choose it to help others even if we are uncomfortable) and a strong will (we do not run away from and carry on despite the difficulty), and it makes sense (coming from a position of rationality). Agape love has an inherent goodness within it that is missing from rationality and free will. Further, without a sense of love that is deliberately in service to others, all of the other loves can be distorted and not be inherently good in themselves.

Take eros as an example. Is it the best kind of romantic relationship when the partner degenerates into a “What’s in it for me?” pattern? Agape balances the tendency in eros to seek one’s own pleasure primarily and says, instead, “How may I serve you?” Agape is a kind of love that has dignity, quiet, and strength as it seeks to build up and even restore others. Agape helps us to see others as possessing inherent worth, a quality that is not earned. The paradox of agape in the context of forgiveness is that as a person reaches out to others who have been unjust, that person experiences considerable emotional healing.

I use the word balance in the previous paragraph. Balance was an important idea for Aristotle, who called it temperance. Each expression of love, whether it is storge, agape, or another variety, itself needs balance unless it becomes distorted by overdoing or underdoing it. For example, if people distort agape by begrudgingly overdoing it, they could perform supposed acts of love with deep resentment, deplete their own reserves, or burn out without being able to love well at all. If people underdo agape, their efforts may be halfhearted, even indifferent, as they perform this lazy distortion of agape. The point is to strive for a good, solid expression of service love without overdoing or underdoing it. Wisdom helps us to know how much is enough.

Love then, in the form of agape, may be the most fundamental and the most important aspect of our being for this one reason: It is inherently good in that, by its definition, we seek meaningful and healthy relationships with others, and therefore it is good for others and for us. All other virtues, by themselves, do not necessarily fulfill any lasting connection between and among people. Justice, by itself, can be a rather cold virtue as, say, a magistrate almost indifferently sentences a person as a rightful punishment for a crime. Courage, by itself, can be a grim duty as, say, a soldier goes to battle because he is ordered to do so. If the need for meaningful connections is part of our religious, ethical, psychological, and biological essence, then agape love is central to that essence. If the fulfillment of meaningful connections is part of our end point as human beings, then the mature understanding and expression of agape love is a major part of that end point, or what philosophers call our summum bonum, or greatest good to which we strive...

Forgiveness can stop the incessant passing on of resentment to future generations. If Caterina displaces her resentment onto her brother, who displaces it onto a friend at school, who displaces it onto his mother when he gets home that evening, then an antidote is needed to all of this displaced resentment. Forgiveness is powerful medicine that can stop the ravages of resentment. Forgiveness, when understood and practiced properly, can reverse the destructive consequences of excessive anger that can result when love is withdrawn from us. Do you see that forgiveness is a protection of your and others’ very humanity? This is so because when you have love withdrawn from you by others’ unjust acts, forgiveness is one way of restoring a sense of love within you, which will make you more open in the future to others’ love toward you. As you love others in a better way, then they, too, have a chance to understand and practice forgiveness and find a way to stop the ravages of resentment in their own relationships and communities...

The beauty of forgiveness is that it allows you to add goodness to your story even when others are intent on polluting your very being with injustices, whether by words, actions, or failures to say or act when they should. Love empowers, and because forgiveness is a variant of love, it too empowers those who are treated unfairly. The beauty of forgiveness is evident when your story is seemingly being written with lots of sadness and bitterness. Forgiveness cannot reverse what has happened to you, but it can reverse your reactions now to what has happened. If you take forgiveness seriously, and if you practice it faithfully, you can actually add love to your story as you give it to others, even to those whom you could not now imagine as being the recipients of your love."

~ Robert D. Enright, The Forgiving Life (APA Lifetools)

~ “Agápē (Ancient Greek ἀγάπη) is a Greco-Christian term referring to love, "the highest form of love, charity" and "the love of God for man and of man for God". The word is not be confused with philia, brotherly love, as it embraces a universal, unconditional love that transcends and persists regardless of circumstance. The noun form first occurs in the Septuagint, but the verb form goes as far back as Homer, translated literally as affection, as in "greet with affection" and "show affection for the dead". Other ancient authors have used forms of the word to denote love of a spouse or family, or affection for a particular activity, in contrast to eros (an affection of a sexual nature).

Within Christianity, agape is considered to be the love originating from God or Christ for mankind. In the New Testament, it refers to the covenant love of God for humans, as well as the human reciprocal love for God; the term necessarily extends to the love of one's fellow man. Some contemporary writers have sought to extend the use of agape into other religions, religious ethics, and science.

Fresco ~ Female figure holding a chalice at an early Christian Agape feast. Catacomb of Saints Marcellinus and Peter, Via Labicana, Rome” ~ Wikipedia