Saturday, August 12, 2023

Steve Garnass-Holmes

Love

Love one another as I have loved you.
—John 13.34

Love is not a feeling
but an act,
a movement of the heart from here to there,
of gratitude and reverence for someone,
a commitment to their well-being,
to share space with them
in the circle of being,
to being co-members in this Body of life.
It is a giving-and-receiving of being.

Love is not a wanting,
you for myself,
(though that’s what we too easily call love),
not for my sake at all,
but, yes, a yearning, unfinished,
like gravity,
for mutual wholeness.

It’s this pull
that holds the world together,
that alone will save us
from our splintered wanderings,
our solitary confinement,
our lonely rage.

To yearn for one another
as we have been yearned for
is the blessing that redeems us,
the settling that answers our gravity’s desire.