In early 2019, I was en route to New Zealand for a leadership retreat with several others when a terrorist opened fire in two mosques in Christchurch. It suspended time, if only for a moment, while questions about who, how many, how did this happen, why, why, why circled the globe. I remember that retreat for a host of lessons and revelations; I remember it most, though, because it was where I first was challenged to cultivate more love in the world, and it was a challenge I didn’t think I was capable of meeting.
I don’t think I’ll ever forget the moment. We were sitting in the grass on top of the headlands, looking out onto the sea. The leader of the retreat was recounting to our group the work she was doing with her own coach and a peer group the night previous: working to love the shooter.
It’s important here to remind audiences in America just how uncommon gun violence, let alone mass shootings are in New Zealand (and, frankly, in just about every other country in the world). This wasn’t a reflexive, habitual call for forgiveness as we see in the United States after events like this. It wasn’t some stronger seeming version of “thoughts and prayers”. It was something else entirely. I’m not sure I can describe it, really.
What I know is that it seemed to me then - and now - as perhaps the most important thing I could hear. I remember the roiling in my gut when I heard her describe what she was practicing with her coach and thinking “that’s not what I’m up to in my life…at all…and it should be, I want it to be…but….how to even start?”. I felt searing anger, not love, during that retreat, during that whole decade of my life, even.
Mostly, I remember the electricity that flowed across my shoulders and down into my legs when she looked at us and said, “love is born at the edge of what you can’t love right now.”
I remember the questions that reflexively came into my head: How can we love terrorists? Should we - should I - love racists, homophobes, and the other -ists and -phobes? How? How can I love billionaires and corporate executives who are willfully exploiting people, Earth, and its resources? Hell, can I even love everyone on this trip with me? Surely, all those were - and sometimes absolutely still are - at the edge of what I can’t love right now.
More, I remember the way this idea pulled me forward, into something new, something that, as I’ve said, I didn’t have confidence I could do. The leader of the trip was absolutely clear that “recycling love” to where it might be difficult, but still doable, was important, but insufficient. Her entire theory of change for the world - for the climate crisis, for the various ways we humans hurt and prey on one another - seemed to be to grow more love in the world, and that it was going to take everything we had in us collectively to do.
Many writers, thinkers, influencers, and artists share versions of this call to action. Often, we use their words about love to soften the tougher, more uncomfortable charges they put to us (see: MLK, audre lorde, bell hooks, Abraham Lincoln). We have a tendency with messages of love to simultaneously diminish their import and to distort their meaning. Our discomfort with love often makes us cheapen it.
Taking just bell hooks as an example: hers was not a life’s work that simply asks us to be nice to each other, to hand out false praise or forgiveness, or to even live in harmony. She was clear on what she meant by love. She wrote an entire book about it so that we might be clear on her meaning and it is, in my estimation at least, one of the most important texts of our lifetimes. Every time I read it, at least once, I have the urge to throw it across the room because some passage resonates so deeply, it is as if bell hooks herself is in front of me, pulling the lies I tell myself from my throat and asking me when I’m going to get serious about this one life I have to live.
all about love: new visions is full of words, like those of the retreat leader, that make my stomach ache in consequence of being invited to face the truth; that make my heart ache to be in the practice of ever more loving relationships; that make my whole nervous system alight in possibility for what could and should be.
In the preface, she echoes countless thinkers today in framing the meta-crisis we face, as she describes why she wrote the book on the topic of love. She writes:
“I awakened from my trance state and was stunned to find the world I was living in, the world of the present, was no longer a world open to love. And I noticed that all around me I heard testimony that lovelessness has become the order of the day. I feel our nation’s turning away from love as intensely as I felt love’s abandonment in my girlhood. Turning away we risk moving into a wilderness of spirit so intense we may never find our way home again. I write of love to bear witness both to the danger in this movement, and to call for a return to love. Redeemed and restored, love returns us to the promise of everlasting life. When we love we can let our hearts speak.”
The love she describes here and elsewhere in the book is not one that is silly, cartoonish, or easy. Neither is that which propelled MLK, audre lorde, Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, or any of the countless others who have stood for a new world and told us the path to it is through love, that love is a daily action that requires intense work and practice.
In the years since that trip to New Zealand, I have returned to the retreat leader’s example thousands of times. Sometimes, I revisit them in the small ways that ultimately add up to how I live my life. For example, can I love the parts of me that criticize me when I’m in front of a mirror, or preparing for a retreat, or after coming home from a social engagement? Can I love the neighborhood cats who are destroying my garden? Can I love the (truly, dozens of) men in every airport who cut in front of me and push me out of the way, as if I don’t even exist?
Perhaps equally, I revisit them in times of tragedy or shock. What does it require of me to love the Memphis mayor? The Memphis police? What does it ask of me to love the countless preachers, neighbors, politicians who would have me and others like me dead for being queer? What does it take for me to love the Russian soldiers? What might I need so that I find love for those who would force their will over my and others’ bodies?
On both fronts, I find the challenge agonizingly difficult, effortful, uncomfortable, and, in the moments I feel I might be touching into birthing more love in this world, exquisite, purposeful, natural, and necessary. The challenge invites me into action over and over again and asks me to meet my inevitable cynicism, despair, fury, and hopelessness with love, too.
I have made countless changes to my life since that retreat in New Zealand in 2019. I live more slowly than I did then. I take care of and tend to my physical and spiritual bodies. I make sure I rest and eat nutritious, life-affirming foods. I have taken each next step I know to heal wounds that are mine and that have been passed down to me; I have many more steps to go. I have loved and appreciated the searing anger I was once defined by so much that it now is only a gentle warmth in my belly, helping me to stay true to my values. Now, I feel much more defined by curiosity, openness, and delight.
Still, today, I am still unsure if I can meet the challenge of birthing love at the edge of where I can’t love right now. Even still, I find myself inspired to keep trying and to not have to know if I can, how I can, or what the path to doing so looks like.
When I get stuck in feelings of overwhelm or cynicism or disgust or even mild frustration, I am reminded, again, by bell hooks saying “it is the practice of love that transforms”.
And that, more than anything, is what I’ve found as the path for my life now, as the path for creating new love at the edge of where I can’t love right now.
I take a breath.
And I get in the practice of love.
Happy Valentine’s Day, loves. May your days be filled with care, connection, wonder, awe, delight, and may you rest in the boundless joy that is abundant and available to us, even though we may find ourselves caught up in something else at this moment. May we all bring about more love in this world than exists at this very moment. May we all taste its rigor, its joy, its invitation to birth a new world.