Ways of Seeing Love

   Around the holiday season, there is always a sense of wanting to wrap up things and resolve for new beginnings. People often try to find a 'resolution' that will make their year a new start. I begin to wonder, however, whether or not there is such a thing as a completely new beginning, and what it might mean? Things always seem to be in process. People are often in a state of striving to complete something, to finish, or to resolve some issue. But no sooner does the issue arise that the cause and conditions shaping it are already starting to fade away. Often, the problem I am seeing is really something that has already passed. I wonder if, instead of making a new year's resolution, a more modest proposal might be to honor the process and everyday rhythm of things.
    I am still trying to puzzle my way around Anders Nygren's book Agape and Eros. What is it about these two kinds of love that continues to fascinate me? I think that the answer has something to do with a struggle that they both seem to represent: the struggle between the love that sees something as  final goal or an anticipation (Eros) and the gentler love of the everyday--- the love that is granted to oneself just through the process of just being (Agape). According to Nygren, the original idea of Christian Agape is that of a Creator who loves through all beings, not because they have earned that love but precisely for the sake of love itself: a love that knows no conditions or boundaries.  The opposite conception of love is one where a person is striving to earn love, to work for love, to complete or consummate love. This kind of love is tied into ego, because it raises the question of whether the lover is capable of 'earning' the love of another being, or a divine being.
     I think the reason this distinction captures my imagination is that it represents for me two different ways of being in the world. The first way is the way of thinking that I must find some precious gem and separate it from the stuff of everyday thought and experience. Whether that precious gem is beauty or truth, or hope...whatever it is, it always comes with the fear that one will never attain it or achieve it if one does the wrong things. What invariably ends up happening is that a person becomes tight inside, as though their life depends on the attainment of an almost impossible goal. According to this view, my happiness depends on the attainment of something that is always far away and better, even though I may not even know what this is. Incidentally, this is also the view that some practitioners have toward the process of enlightenment. I sometimes get this sense that I need to be getting somewhere by a certain time. But do I really understand where I am supposed to be?
    Another way of looking at things might be to trust that certain experiences are present and have their own unique value in a total life. Rather than second guessing the value of things or sacrificing their value for some faraway goal or place, an alternate way would be to value everything equally, as equal parts of mind. This is a kind of choice to see things as natural gifts and then try to figure out how to connect to those gifts. Rather than thinking there is 'only one' thing to strive for, perhaps there is a way of seeing the value and the lesson of this present moment, and to be confident in its gift and value.