THE DOMINANCE OF ROMANTIC LOVE

'I wonder if we all lose by centring romantic love in our lives. And it does still feel like romantic love is centred. Even as the internet has helped us find our own warm pocket of community within the endless variations of romantic and sexual idenitity; even though state and church control of who cannot be romantcially and sexually involved, and who can have their relationships recognised, has loosened. Nothing has displaced romantic love from its holy status. If we were to pay attention, what do we fail to notice, share and celebrate because of this? Is it possible that life without romantic love isn't that bad? Is it possible we can take as much pleasure in other loves, find new ways of incorporating romantic feeling into our lives, assign importance to crossing over thresholds that romantic love has abandoned?'

Amy Key, Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Love and Making a Life, p.10.

PRAISE DEFINED

'Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it.'
CS Lewis, A Grief Observed, p.53.

REJOICE WITH THOSE WHO REJOICE, MOURN WITH THOSE WHO MOURN

'Love never stands aloof from other people's joys or pains. Love identifies with them, sings with them and suffers with them. Love enters deeply into their experiences and their emotions, their laughter and their tears, and feels solidarity with them, whatever their mood.'

John Sott, The Message of Romans, p.333.

FRIENDSHIP VS. ROMANCE

'Ironically a friend is someone whom you repay for not wanting to possess you, and it may count among the nuances of love that we cannot extend that same consideration to those we fancy.'

Andrew O'Hagan, On Friendship, p.12.

THE POWER OF LOVE

'When we talk about the problem of the art of monstrous men, we are really talking about a larger problem - the problem of human love. The question "what do we do with the art?" is a kind of laboratory or a kind of practice for the real deal, the real question: what is it to love someone awful? The problem is that you still love her. How often this describes our relationships with our families, our spouses, sometimes even our children. It's the problem and it's the solution, this durable nature of love, the way it withstands all the shit we throw at it, the bad behaviour, the disappointments, the antrums, the betrayals.

What do we do about the terrible people in our lives? Mostly we keep loving them.

Families are hard because they are the monsters (and angels, and everything in between) that are foisted upon us. They're unchosen monsters. How random it all seems, when you really consider it. And yet somehow we mostly end up loving our families anyway.

When I was young, I believed in the perfectibility of humans. I believed that the people I loved should be perfect and I should be perfect too. That's not quite how love works.'

Claire Dederer, Monsters, p.256.

GRIEF

'...grief, as I said, is a state as well as a process. And as with love, time simultaneously both stops and moves. You want it to stop - to be a state, so that you can hold on as much as possible to the image and memory of the lost loved one; but you also want it to be a process, one which will convey you out of this strange new land of pain before your spirit breaks.'

Julian Barnes, Changing My Mind, p.56.

LOVING YOUR NEIGHBOUR

'To love your neighbor is to see your neighbor. To see somebody, to really see somebody, you have to love somebody.'

Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary, p.39.

LOVE IS A POLICY

'Love is not an emotion. It is a policy.'
Hugh Bishop in Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet, p.45.

DEEP LOVE

'The deepest love is not a painful lack seeking satisfaction for oneself, but a bountiful overflow seeking the good for one's beloved, in generative acts both large and small.'

Leon Kass & Hannah Mandelbaum, Reading Ruth: Birth, Redemption and the Way of Israel, p.88.

PRACTICING LOVE WHEN WE DON'T FEEL IT

'The proper question, perhaps, is not why we have so much divorce, but why we are so unforgiving. The answer, perhaps, is that, though we still recognize the feeling of love, we have forgotten how to practice love when we don't feel it.'

Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, p.140.

THE PRACTICE OF LOVE

'...marriage, family life, friendship, neighborhood, and other personal connections do not depend exclusively or even primarily on justice - though, of course, they all must try for it. They depend also on trust, patience, respect, mutual help, forgiveness - in other words, the practice of love, as opposed to the mere feeling of love.'

Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, p.139.

THE PRECIOUS GIFT OF LOVING DISAGREEMENT

'The occasion to have a safe and thoughtful discussion with someone who genuinely loves you and disagrees with you passionately is a rare and precious gift.'

Gregg A Ten Elshof, I told me so: self-deception and the Christian life, p.119.

YOU NEED GOD'S SPIRIT TO BE A BALANCED CHRISTIAN

'...in the flesh we can stress purity without love or we can stress the love of God without purity, but ...in the flesh we cannot stress both simultaneously. In order to exhibit both simultaneously, we must look moment by moment to the work of Christ, to the work of the Holy Spirit.'

Francis A Schaeffer, The Church Before the Watching World, p.45.

THE LINK BETWEEN ANGER & LOVE

'Anger is energy released to defend something you love. God is angry toward the evil that dishonours him and ruins that which he loves. But the problem with human anger is this - we tend to overlove the wrong things.'

Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller, The Way of Wisdom, p.120.

HOW GRACE LEADS TO LOVE

'...loving people without reason, he discovered the unquestionable reasons for which it was worth loving them.'

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, p.1124.

THE LIMITS TO THE JOY OF SEX

'Human love knows no definitive consummation, no absolute fulfillment. Loving relationships are never complete. They are always ongoing, always reaching out for more. Regardless of the quality or frequency of lovemaking, there is always a measure of yearning present.' 

Dianne Bergant in Julian Hardyman, Jesus, Lover of My Soul, p.151.

PROOF OF LOVE

'There is only one proof for the presence of love: the depth of the relationship, and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned; this is the fruit by which love is recognised.'

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, p.80.  

REAL LOVE

'Real love is the very opposite of idealisation. Rather, it has to do with knowledge, a deep, real, sensitive knowledge of the other people in your life and the care you give them. Love is a kind of knowing. 

The real lover is neither Rossetti or Picasso. The real lover is the man who broke down on Women's Hour this morning. He spent three years looking after his dying wife, tending her each day, doing her teeth, washing her hair, putting a new necklace around her neck each morning, something she had done for herself before she got dementia.  

'Why don't you put her in a home and get a life?' his friends would ask him. 

'Because she is my life,' he told them.' 

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.222. 

WHY LOVE NEEDS COMMITMENT

'A commitment is falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.' 

David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, p.xviii.

SERVICE LEADS TO JOY

'Have you ever noticed that people who are self-focused and narcissistic are usually really unhappy, if not depressed? Sadly, I know this from experience. But have you also noticed that people who are generally others-focused and more selfless are usually very happy? That's not a coincidence. It's the way of Jesus in action. When we're down, one of the best things we can do is serve somebody else. It's the backdoor to joy. And it's always unlocked.' 

John Mark Comer, Garden City, p.279.