February 13, 2006

Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.                                                                       —Mother Teresa

A string of pink and red balloons waves high in the air, visible from the road a mile away.  They fly, tied to the top of a 15 x 15 ft. open air tent, calling attention to the temporary marketplace in the parking lot, just outside the grocery’s main entrance.

It’s Valentine’s Day.  Churches were decorated for Sweetheart Dinners last Sunday.  Today, flowers and balloon bouquets were loaded early in the morning onto delivery trucks.  Kids all around the country drop valentines into decorated shoeboxes for their classmates.  And, on their way home, last minute shoppers can pull up to the white tent and grab a potted red geranium, a box of chocolates, and a bottle of champagne.

Nothing is too good for a sweetheart.  In the age of the Internet, there are endless ideas for that perfect gift to communicate your amore.  At Amore’ on the Net you can find it all in one spot.  Two chubby cherubs drop little hearts down the page, dragging visitors below to a pulsing heart and a list of perfect Valentine’s Day ideas.

Even Chef Emeril Lagase isn’t afraid to “kick it up a notch” with his “special treats for your loved ones.”  Who wouldn’t feel loved being served banana chocolate bread pudding with mint créme anglaise?

I’m a great fan of food, and I must admit, banana chocolate bread pudding with mint créme anglaise prepared a la Chef Emeril wins the day over such extravaganzas like the giant human-sized stuffed red teddy bear I saw a man carry to his car.

Valentine’s Day is a great reminder of just how important it is to tell people we love just how important they are to us.  And, in a year where we have dedicated ourselves at FROM THE HOME FRONT to a consideration of love, it seems appropriate to ask…

Why can’t every day be Valentine’s Day?

Imagine buying the perfect Valentine’s Day gift, worth a million dollars, but costing you only a moment of thoughtfulness.  A renewable gift.  No shopping required.  Handy at every moment, just when you need it, in unlimited quantities…every day of the year.

Give the gift of kindness.

Love is patient, Love is kind.¹ 

Love is a choice…a choice to be patient and kind.  Who can’t afford such a luxury in a modern world where we are supposed to have everything?

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.²

How nice it is to be greeted in the morning with a kiss and a Good Morning, I Love You.

Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love. ²

Smile.  How wonderful to be greeted by the smiles, even of perfect strangers, during the day when the daily battle has worn us down!

Look in their eyes.

Pause…stop…listen.  Listen.

Listen. Do not have an opinion while you listen because frankly, your opinion doesn’t hold much water outside of Your Universe. Just listen. Listen until their brain has been twisted like a dripping towel and what they have to say is all over the floor.³

Without holding your response in your mouth, waiting for your turn to speak…listen.

Love is kind.

I would give up receiving a dozen, dozen red roses, just to have one person spend a week devoted to kindness in my honor.  You?  How hard it is to listen with an empty mouth!  Yet, motivated by love, I think I just might be able to manage.

We must give what we hope to receive.  Let it begin with us.

Love is kind.

Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired.   (Mother Teresa)

 

November 12, 2004 – Old As the Hills

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February 6, 2006

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.                                                                                                                         Mother Teresa

Born on May 6, 1856, in Moravia, Sigmund Freud was destined to radically alter the understanding of the human heart.  Freud graduated as a doctor in 1881, and his initial professional work involved research on the uses of cocaine.  But over the next fifty years, following his fascination with dream analysis, Freud developed the new field of psychoanalysis and, abandoning his Jewish heritage, embraced atheism.

Since Freud, many new theories of human personality have been constructed.  And the U.S. Department of Labor reports that psychiatry and psychology are the “fastest growing occupations projected to have the largest numerical increases in employment between 2004 and 2014.”

Psychologists study the human mind and human behavior.   So it is more than idle curiosity to wonder what they study of love.  Very little, according to “Love Doctor” Leo Buscaglia.  In 1969, Buscaglia endured professional ridicule in order to begin an experimental class devoted to the study of love at a California university.

His students’ first major lesson about love was unexpected.  “Love has really been ignored by the scientists.  It’s amazing,” wrote Bascaglia.  “My students and I did a study.  We went through books in psychology.  We went through books in sociology.  We went through books in anthropology, and we were hardpressed to find even a reference to the word love.”

So it is today.  Standing in the bookstore of our local state university, reading through psychology textbooks, love is still absent from any professional consideration.

Holding Learning and Behavior, skimming chapter one on the psychology of learning and behavior, I note that students will study the spectrum of influences on human behavior:  external events, classical Pavlovian conditioning, habituation, operant conditioning schedules, punishment, stimulus control, imitation, modeling, choice and self control.  But nary one word about love.  Neither is love listed in the index.

The textbook Science and Human Behavior by B.F. Skinner is only slightly better.  Love appears in the index twice.   On page 162, love is likened to fear and anger…a person “is generally talking about predispositions to act in certain ways….the man ‘in love’ shows an increased tendency to aid, favor, be with, and caress and a lowered tendency to injure.”  On page 310, Skinner teaches that “…love might be analyzed as the mutual tendency of two individuals to reinforce each other, where the reinforcement may or may not be sexual.”

That’s it.  That’s the full consideration of the one emotion forceful enough to make the world go round.

In The Nature of Prejudice, the author actually writes a complete sentence about love.  “Why is it,” he asks, “that we hear so little about love – prejudice – the tendency to overgeneralize our categories of attachment and affection?”  This notion of “love-prejudice” pops up just one more time in his textbook that has six pages referenced in the index for sex and a whole section devoted to sexuality.

Sensing a pattern, I reached for the fourth and final psychology textbook, Psychology of Behavior.  Its eighteen chapters thoroughly cover human behavior: human consciousness, evolution, nervous cells and structure, psychopharmacology, methods of research, ethical issues, vision, audition, chemical senses, control and movement, sleep, reproductive behavior, emotion, memory, ingestive behavior, relational learning, schizophrenia, affective disorder, anxiety disorder, autistic disorder, hyperactivity disorder, stress disorder and drug abuse.

Love?  Not there.  But, checking the book’s index, if you want to know about sex, there is no end in sight: hormones, chromosomes, activational effects, gender development, sexual maturation, arousal, prefrontal cortex, hormonal control, human sex, sex of lab animals, neural control, sexual dimorphism, prenatal androgens, sexually dimorphic nucleus (SDN), orientation, heredity…my fingers wore out just listing all the ways we have to study sex.

Love may make the world go round.  But when the world is sick from lack of love, it is the last thing our love doctors think to check.

If the academics miss the obvious, a humble woman with no desire to reach the pinnacle of professional greatness sees it all.  “Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody,” said Mother Teresa, “I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.”

In the midst of plenty, we are a love sick world.

What does it say about the likelihood that we can recover from love sickness, if our most elite educators study more about our sexually dimorphic nucleus than about our ability to love one another?

What does it say about our future, if those who study to fill the exploding market of jobs for psychiatrists and psychology can memorize the psychopharmacology of modern drugs, but have only read two pages in their college text about love as a prejudice?

And what does it say about our children and their love future when we have saturated their world with so much of sexual orientations and so little of love?

“Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody…”  We are love sick.  And we need a cure.

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It is easy to love the people far away. It is not always easy to love those close to us. It is easier to give a cup of rice to relieve hunger than to relieve the loneliness and pain of someone unloved in our own home. Bring love into your home for this is where our love for each other must start.                                                     Mother Teresa

 

December 10, 2004 – The Best Part of Snuggling

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January 9, 2006

In the winter of 1969, a California professor began an experimental class.  “I did not want it to become an encounter group.  I was an educator, not a psychotherapist.  I wanted this class to be a unique experience in learning.  I wanted it to have a definite, yet loose, framework and be of broad interest and import to the student.  I wanted it to be related to his immediate experience.  Students with whom I was relating were, more than ever, concerned with life, living, sex, growth, responsibility, death, hope, the future.  It was obvious that the only subject which encompassed, and was at the core of all these concerns and more, was love.”

Few will dispute Leo Buscaglia’s claim that love is at the core of human concerns.  Yet, his Love Class “raised a few eyebrows.”  In the Faculty Center, one professor “called love—and anyone who purported to teach it—‘irrelevant!’”  He wasn’t alone.  “Others asked mockingly and with a wild leer, if the class had a lab requirement….”

Love Class met on Tuesday evenings.  Enrollment grew quickly within a year to 100 students of all ages, experiences and sophistication.  Buscaglia taught it without salary and on top of his regular teaching load.  Students earned no credit.

Their first major lesson about love was learning how little love matters to people who study the things that matter.  “Love has really been ignored by the scientists.  It’s amazing.  My students and I did a study.  We went through books in psychology.  We went through books in sociology.  We went through books in anthropology, and we were hardpressed to find even a reference to the word love.”

Drawing from three years of teaching Love Class, Buscaglia began writing and speaking about love.  He lectured often.  When asked for the title of his presentation, he was characteristically direct.  “Love.”

“Well, you know,” event planners said, “this is a professional meeting, and it may not be understood.  What will the press say?”  Tactfully and professionally, Buscaglia resolved their problem.  How about Affect as a Behavior Modifier?  Perfect.  Acceptable.  Scientific.  Everyone was happy.

Love…learning love…Buscaglia never felt comfortable reducing consideration of love to a simple definition.  Doing the next best thing, he wrote his 1972 book, LOVE.  But in the practical sense, if we are to look for and talk about love, we need something shorter than a book, something easy to think about, something we can carry with us through each day.

Searching for agreement on what love is, there’s no better place to look than to the most quoted passage read at weddings around the country.  A profession of love on the most important day for two people, it has spoken to the heart of man across the ages.

Love

 ¹If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. ²If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. ³If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.  

 ⁴Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

 

 ⁸Love never fails. [1Cor 13:1-8, NIV]

If this is love, we should be able to know it when we see it.

If this is love, and if we know what we see…what does it say about the things we DO see?

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Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.  

The “NIV” and “New International Version” trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

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 January 23, 2006 –  To Know Love When We See Love, Part 2

September 12, 2005 –  Kiss, Kiss, I Love You

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