LOVE IS COMPLICATED BUT IT'S THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN

Probably the best thing about humanity is our capacity to love. Each other, that is, not chocolate donuts or baseball or dancing or fast cars or reading or any of the other bazillion things we humans enjoy. Enjoyment is one aspect of love, especially when we seek to share what we enjoy with another person. That's where the love comes in, the sharing. There was a hit song many years ago that declared "What the world needs now, is love, sweet love." Sounds pretty sappy and simple, but was it ever truer than now?

With love comes laughter, understanding, forgiveness, fascination, elation, joy, wonder and fulfillment. Not many reasons to look for the complaint department there. Love is also demanding, forcing us to bring out the best within ourselves, conquering any selfishness, greed and mistrust we may harbor within us. Love wishes no ill will on another. Love opens your heart to endless possibilities within yourself, giving you a glimpse of the vastness of your human soul. Love is never small, never binding. It's huge.

Nothing affects us in life like love. Anyone who has had their heart broken can testify to the flip side of love, its absence, its loss, as empty and devastating a feeling as a person can experience. There you are, your heart so full of love for another, but they do not return it and you are lost, nowhere to put all the love inside of you. The temptation is to lash out, to deny that love is real and to build a thorny wall around your heart so that no can ever break it again and cause you so much intolerable pain. But that rarely happens, and the poor souls who achieve that bitter isolation are to be pitied.

What happens to most of us is that time heals our hearts and we love again, a courageous act and an exercise in trust and faith in our fellow human beings. We know instinctively that they are worthy of our love and we are worthy of the love they give to us, and so again we roll the dice. And again we collect the rewards of giving our vast reservoirs of love to others. Getting love in return is the byproduct of sharing your love, and the fierce and powerful love we give one another shapes our lives.

When we look at the greater world and the apparent absence of love our hearts recoil at the horror and inhumanity that seems to prevail. Wars, mass starvation, hatred and misunderstanding between nations of humans seem to be the order of the day. But this world is filled with people with an identical capacity for love as our own, and no wish to cause harm or to be harmed. Violence and hatred are aspects of misunderstanding and alienation, the absence of love. Can we throw love at the problems of the world like naive children? We should, because nothing else seems to be working, and the opposite of love is hate. Why go there when we know from long and painful experience where that train is headed?

Sharing food is love, sharing knowledge is love and healing the sick is love. A kind word to an angry man is love. A willingness to learn about another way of life is love. Tolerance is love. To love only those who agree with you is not true love, it is supreme selfishness, while true love is generous. How could it not be when so many opposites attract? There has never been a human being born in this world who has not felt love, or tragically, its absence. Either way, love has had a profound effect on every human life. First and foremost in our dealings with one another we must assume that there is love, we must give it and receive it unashamed, for love is not weakness, but our greatest strength.

When we approach another human being with mistrust and hatred, we are condemning that relationship to narrow, bitter conflict. When we open with love, we throw open the doors to endless possibilities for mutual understanding and respect, for love is also respect for oneself and others. We have all seen how powerful is love's opposite, hate, and the misery and death it has brought to our lives. That absence of love is simply love unfulfilled, the dark face of mankind's love and the incredible energy of love turned towards destruction and murder. There is an insatiable passion in destruction, white hot searing energy that lashes out and murders, maims, starves and enslaves other human beings. Love turned inside out.

There is no hate in a being without the capacity to love. The animal that devours another feels no hatred for its victim. But man is not an animal. If we did not love so powerfully, we could never destroy so wantonly. The lion kills only the prey that it will eat, never slaughtering simply because it can. In the absence of love, that is precisely what man is capable of doing. To quote John Lennon singing about our most basic human instinct: "Love is the answer, you know that for sure." Or as Jesus said of the Commandments: "The greatest of these is love." Sounds simple, but it's not. It takes courage to love. Destruction and violence is the easy way out, the way of the coward. Love may be complicated, but it's the only way to conquer ourselves and the evil in this world. Be brave. Share your love.