The Art Of Loving
Opening Words
Love cannot remain by iteself—it has no meaning
Love has to be put into action and that action is service.
—Mother Teresa
Check-in
Sharing by participants in this covenanted UU community.
Topic
Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance, something one 'falls into' if one is lucky?
Not that people think that love is unimportant. They are starved for it; they watch endless numbers of films about happy and unhappy love stories, they listen to hundreds of trashy songs about love—yet hardly anyone thinks that there is anything that needs to be learned about love.
This peculiar attitude is based on several premises which either singly or combined tend to uphold it. Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable.
A second premise behind the attitude that there is nothing to be learned about love is the assumption that the problem of love is the problem of an object, not the problem of a faculty. People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love, or be loved by, is difficult.
A third error leading to the assumption that there is nothing to be learned about love lies in the confusion between the initial state of 'falling' in love and the permanent state of being in love.
The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art; just as living is an art.
—Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
Focus Questions
- How much love is present in your life?
- What can you (or any of us) do to increase our capacity for love?
- Relate an experience when your understanding of love deepened.
- What opportunities did you miss before that experience?
- How are things different now?
Likes And Wishes
Invitation to participants to share thoughts, feelings, or issues that came up for them during the experience of this session.
Closing Words
And now these, faith and hope and love abide, these three, and the greatest of these is love.
—1 Corinthians 13
Last updated on Tuesday, March 6, 2007.
