by Don MacGregor
Love is a much misused word. We express it in so many different ways. I love my wife. I love my children. But I also love a good book, or a bowl of rice pudding! I love a beautiful sunset! But Christianity is based on Jesus’s teaching to love one another and even to love your enemy. This is unconditional love, not dependent on the response of the other. Inherently, we know that love expressed towards all other beings is the way to growth and to higher ways of being. But this isn’t just human sentimental love, this isn’t love just as a feeling. This love is the divine power that creates, it is the driver for evolution. The way I see it, love is a universal quality of bringing things into relationship, an attracting force driving the evolution of the universe. There is something which has drawn everything into deeper relationships as the universe has developed and evolved. We tend to call that something God.
Love, to my mind, is a force of attraction that brings things into further and deeper relationship. Going back to the big bang, when this universe came into being, quantum particles were brought into relationship to form atoms, simple ones like hydrogen and helium at first. But then other relationships formed, and other elements came into being. These elements started to interact to form molecules, and a complexity of relationship developed. Eventually, this driving evolutionary force of attraction into relationships formed organic compounds, which then came together to form simple, single celled organisms, living beings, reacting to their environment. But it didn’t stop there. Deeper relationships formed, multicellular creatures that could reproduce, at first just by copying themselves. But eventually, sexual relationships came about, and love, as attraction between the sexes, came out into the open, and developed qualities of nurture and care. And it is love that has driven forward this ever deeper, more complex relationship structure. Love is an evolutionary force underlying the formation and continuity of the universe.
I can still love a bowl of rice pudding, but what I mean is I like, or am fond of. We need to use more words in English to differentiate between liking, fondness, attraction, caring, nurturing and compassion. Altruistic, unconditional love is a sense of wanting the best outcome to happen for all relationships, and then nurturing it into being – and maybe that is what evolution is, love working its way out, love in action. Just turn round the first four letters of evolution and what do you get!! Love-ution!