People frequently ask how these three spheres of love are related to one another. The Greeks, however, saw a clear difference between three forms of love: passion, which is possessive desire eros, which is the attraction of body and soul and finally agape, which is divine love, God’s all-embracing love that gives itself to all. Our language does not distinguish between types of love to indicate the healthy and the sick relationships between body and soul and between soul and spirit. Nowhere do people come together, nowhere are living beings procreated and born, unless a spark of love unfolds its life force. No animal, however small, is hatched or born without love. In the great universe, the rhythmic order of the circling constellations represents a monumental image of love. Nature’s powers of attraction all derive from the same mystery of love. This mystery suggests that love is the one thing around which every living thing moves, to which every hope is tied, by which everything that breathes living power is sustained. In this simplicity of expression the mystery of love lies hidden. In our language there is only one word for all the degrees of love, even for all its sick and deviant forms. Yet they lack the living vision to separate the pure, original force of love from its weakened forms. Ultimately, they want nothing but the fulfilment of their own being and God’s being. They realize that much water trickles away or evaporates instead of finding the way for which it is destined. Perhaps they sense that all love must end in God, just as all rivers flow into the ocean. They have not discovered the secret of how to guide its living stream into the right channel. Like a dying crater they burn out their hearts in impure passion instead of letting the sun’s eternal powers glow through them, passing on to others pure light and genuine warmth.įor most people, love is a labyrinth in which they cannot take a step without blundering. Their outward person deteriorates because they let their inward humanity go to ruin. They allow the house of their lives to be destroyed in a smoldering fire. Love appears to them as a blazing fire, which their fearful souls want to avoid others, who are no more fireproof, come too close to the flame. Among youth, too, there are those who flee love like the plague. There are many who, in hours of anxiety, fear the love life. Each one feels that love is his or her destiny. Love is a vital question for every young person. Those who allow love’s ardent urge and longing to go unused are suffering the same incalculable loss of their most precious possession as those who squander their most sacred powers in a dirty drain. Affirmation of life is found only when love unfolds without restraint. When love sickens and degenerates, the innermost life is poisoned. No one can live without love. A person without love is aging and dying in truth, such a person is already dead. Only if he were to give himself with new faithfulness to his old longing for life and love, turning away from everything that had killed life and love, would the message of Christmas bring him new life. Only if the spirit of his youth could be re-awakened would his loneliness, coldness, and emptiness give way to God’s warmth. His life is so completely turned away from the human community that his death is merely the confirmation of a long-established condition. A man of established fortune, he becomes a soulless being. Any pure hope he once had is consumed in his striving to assure himself of recognition and success in the financial world, until at last every noble feeling is extinguished. He has even sacrificed the love of his youth to the idol of money. In extreme loneliness, Scrooge lives a purely commercial existence without any human relationships whatsoever. This deathly atmosphere is so tangible around him that no child or beggar on the street dares approach him for the slightest help. Nothing but coldness comes from him, as if he were a man without a heart. His life has been ruined because he has given himself over completely to earning money. In his Christmas Carol, Dickens portrays a rich old merchant in whom all but the last spark of love has died. While understanding their desire to live authentically, Eberhard Arnold, a prominent figure in this movement, tried to guide fellow seekers to a richer understanding and experience of human love – one aligned with God’s divine love. Tired of the stuffy social conventions of their day, thousands of young people were searching for more genuine, free, and egalitarian relationships.
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