Love is powerful! The Christian way of life is all about recognising the power of love in our lives. In the words of Bishop Michael Curry, who preached at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle back in 2018, “Love is the only way. There’s power in love. Don’t underestimate it. Don’t even over sentimentalize it. There’s power, power in love.”
I love that phrase, “Don’t underestimate it!” Love is present and it’s real. And it’s transformative. The power of love can transform individuals and it can transform whole societies.
There are moments in our lives, when we experience this love, this Spirit, and they can change us and provoke us to be better people.
These are the God-moments, or, to put it another way, these are the moments when we see with our Jesus-eyes. Have you ever experienced that? That moment when you see someone else, or even part of the natural world, not just through your own eyes, but as if you are looking that person or that part of nature in the way that Jesus would look at them: with compassion and love.
In the ancient world, the Greeks had many different words for the different types of love. The four main ones are as follow:
Agape (ἀγάπη):
This represents a selfless, unconditional love, often associated with divine love or the love God has for humanity. It’s the love that is patient, kind, and doesn’t envy.
Eros (ἔρως):
This refers to passionate, romantic love, often associated with sexual desire and intimacy. It’s the love that inspires poets and artists.
Philia (φιλία):
This signifies love between friends or companions, characterized by loyalty, trust, and shared experiences. Wikipedia says it’s a love based on shared values and mutual affection.
Storge (στοργή):
This is a natural affection, especially within a family. It’s the love that exists between parents and children, or between siblings. It’s a love built on familiarity and deep attachment.
Just imagine if we were all able to express agape to one another? Agape is one-of-a-kind love. It is an empathetic, selfless love for others that includes a love for God, nature, strangers, and the less fortunate. It doesn’t depend on familiarity (as does Storge), but instead, Agape has links to altruism, which is understood as an unselfish, genuine concern for the welfare of others. A lot of people consider Agape to be a kind of spiritual love and it’s expressed through meditation, nature, intuition, and spirituality. Christians believe this is the love Jesus had for all of mankind. It is sacrificial and quite radical, honestly, as the Greeks believed that very few people were able to experience it long-term. In today’s world, you can think of Agape as a pay-it-forward sort of love. It is a love that expects absolutely nothing in return, and in turn, just makes you feel good. Not only is Agape associated with boosted mental and physical health, but some say it leaves a euphoric feeling, somewhat of a “helper’s high.”
The first car that I bought with my own money was a 1969 Toyota Corona. It was 20 years old when I bought it and I think it’s fair to say that it had had a hard life. The engine still ran like a dream (which is a testimony to Toyota’s engineering prowess) but the body, well, let’s just say that its best days were long gone. It was very square, so it looked like a giant match box car (something my friends were always happy to point out) and, perhaps more worrying, still had lap seat belts in the back: seat belts that only went across your lap and not over your shoulder as well.
As you will know, the vast majority of cars these days have 3-point seatbelts, seatbelts that attach to 3 points in the car, so they come over your shoulder and across your waist. They’re compulsory on all new cars and they are infinitely safer than the old lap belts that my ancient Toyota had. What you may not know is that the Swedish carmaker, Volvo, invented the 3 point set-belt. It was created by Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin in 1951 (I have no idea is that’s how you pronounce his name!) and installed in the first production car a few years later. Volvo decided not to put a patent on it, but, rather, to allow any manufacturer to copy their design, for no cost, because Volvo believed that safety world-wide was more important than how much money they could make from the design.
The world owes Volvo a great debt of gratitude. Only the Lord Almighty knows how many lives their generosity has saved over the years.
It’s said that if you want to guarantee that a really great idea will spread around the world, you have to be prepared to forget about being paid for it.
Just listen to what the social activist, the Rev’d Dr Martin Luther King had to say: “We must discover the power of love, the redemptive power of love, and when we do that, we will make of this old world a new world.”
The Reverend Dr Theo McCall
School Chaplain
