…Let me count the ways

By Roger Mock

Well, apparently there are four possibilities. At least in ancient Greek there are four words given for love. They are: storge to describe familial love, philia to describe love for a friend, eros for sensual love and—the word for love we hear Jesus use most often in the New Testament—agape. Agape can be seen as God’s love or the highest form of love, though the older meaning is something like “love with a moral compass” or maybe “love that shows no preferences – unconditional love.”

A human is like a refracting prism in the way it takes in love from Source and divvies it out in a multi-hued spectrum. Unity’s founder, Charles Fillmore, wrote that “In reality there is only one love; when man expresses divine love in limited ways he makes a separation in consciousness and his expression of love is personal instead of universal.”

All of the different varieties of love can be traced back to the purer form. According to Socrates, sensual love or eros helps the soul recall knowledge of beauty, and contributes to an understanding of spiritual truth. A 19th century mystical poem by Augusta Drane put it this way:

“It is the melody of all sweet music. In all fair forms it is the hidden grace.”

Eros is about desire and fulfillment of desire and, though the human tendency is to be distracted and waylaid by the “sirens” of sensuality, our ultimate lesson is to learn that all of our yearnings are really yearnings for full communion with the Divine, for a return to the source of love, indeed to Love Itself.

Philia, the love of one friend for another, is an exclusionary love. You are my friend. They are not yet my friends though they could conceivably become my friends, but those hooligans over there – get real. Philia, too, can be traced back from the personal to the universal. The relationship of trust, honesty and sharing that is friendship works as a kind of mini classroom. Once we learn how to “do philia,” we can make the conceptual leap that the ultimate goal is to extend philia to the whole world. And so we entertain notions of universal brotherhood and global friendship as the ideal. However unattainable such a utopia may at times seem, we all know that peaceable kingdom is what we need to strive and hope for.

Storge, or familial love, teaches a similar lesson. We have a bond with family that is simply a given. Family is family. It’s different from friendship. We may have little in common with a sibling in terms of our likes and dislikes and proclivities, but the family bond remains for us unless we allow that deeper trust to be severed by some kind of “unforgivable” behavior. Like philia, storge leads us back to universal love as we begin to “get” that we are all family.

In this way we can see classroom nature of the human experience. Divine Love is “stepped down” to us in this world of limitation that we might learn through the microcosm of human relationships to give and receive love within—to put it frankly—the very harsh conditions of earthly life; a place where it is much easier to withdraw, to protect and defend ourselves, rather than to reach out and embrace all that we encounter as a manifestation of one loving Source.

A classroom implies that we have come from somewhere and that we are going somewhere before and after our “schooling.” I suspect and believe that that “somewhere” is the realm of Spirit where we live in the fuller knowledge and presence of universal, undiluted Love. Perhaps the soul chooses the earthly experience of limitation in order to increase that love.

As children my siblings and I spent a lot of time in the summer at the lake. We loved to see how long and how far we could swim underwater, holding our breath. Little by little we could increase the time and distance. What a relief, though, to come back to the surface and take a deep, full breath of air! I think our earth experience is like that. I think that we plunge back into this realm of physicality and limitation many times for our own soul’s growth in the limitless, all-pervading Love that brought us into being and always supports and guides us in our journey Home.