We have some real savants, some real deep, wise minds in our youth group. I won’t litanize all the names out because I didn’t clear with all of them to share them individually. But what I can share is that we have some very thoughtful, wonderful perspectives from our youth.
This last Sunday, as we were exploring the dimensions to what love can mean, two important ideas were shared that resonated so deeply with the best expressions of the dimensions of love. It left me meditating on the things that were shared and it left me so appreciative of how wise our young people are!
One thing that was raised is that other languages have more ways to talk about love than English does, which can invite us to understand Love in more ways. We talked about how Greek has multiple words for love that express love differently. C.S. Lewis wrote one of the best (and only) explorations of these expressions for the kind of love we express that resonantes in humankind.
Another idea expressed in our discussion was the way that love broadens us, widens us, and evolves us. I was overwhelmed by how insightful this is, and how this expression of love is experienced in terms of uncertainty, of mystery and of possibility. It called to mind the well-loved quote from Rilke that is a good guideline for how we think as well as for how we love:
“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
From Letters to a Young Poet
Could we not also say “love your way into the answer”? Love is a mystery and will continue to be a mystery that we live into. Finding ways to express what we learn and how the practices of love change us is an important part of how we all will continue to grow.
Sometimes it is hard to tap into our spiritual selves or find time to nurture our creativity and intellectual curiosity. Here is a section that reflects on some nourishing materials from around the web and related media channels in order to get us thinking, get us feeling, and get us reflecting on the lives we are living in this big world. **Some Adult/Mature Themes May Appear in Links and Other Attached Material**
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Allan T. Georgia, MDiv, MTS, PhD
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