Love Manifesto

“God is love.” - 1 John 4:8

“Justice is what love looks like in public.” - Cornel West

I have a bumper sticker on my office door that says, “The real revolution will be love.” What that captures about me is not only the fact that I love intensely, but also that I actively wield my love as a force. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  said that, "Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love." It is time to reclaim love from the greeting card companies. Love has the capacity to make the world a better place, but only if we understand that love’s power is not in catching more flies with honey, but in recognizing and acting on behalf of our shared humanity and liberation.

The power of love begins within ourselves. Just as on an airplane we need to put on our own oxygen mask before we help others, so too with love we must tend to ourselves before we are equipped to care for others. While love of self must be rooted internally, it is most secure when it receives validation from the outside. We hear about how often bullies are insecure - they bring others down because of a vacuum in their own self worth. We need to support those around us in loving themselves. We need to reflect their light back to them. Psychologist Abraham Maslow’s pyramid of human needs illustrated that our being loved as a member of a community is part of the full expression of our humanity. As South African philosophy posits, “I am because we are.”

Once we feel secure in ourselves and our relationships, we can expand beyond our comfort zones. In order to do this, we must embrace a love of multidimensional truth, a respect for the fact that our experiences help shape our realities, so there is no truth with a capital T. Although we often cling to the comfort of our bubbles, research has proven that groups with diverse perspectives are more successful. We can develop a multidimensional understanding of the world both through interpersonal relationships and through stories that allow us to connect with protagonists that are drastically distinct from us. We must remain open to our paradigm shifting.

As we come to better understand the world, we must more fully interact with it. We need a love of civic engagement. Nothing in our community, our nation, our world will get better if those who act out of love aren’t willing to do so publicly. We must find opportunities to embrace our agency and stand in our power. Khalil Gibran wrote that “Work is love made visible.” We must find inroads to the work of community building and the work of systems change.

When times get tough, it can be easy to check out. What allows us to stay grounded is the belief that we are a part of something greater than ourselves. Mother Teresa said, “If we have no peace it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” For the purpose of solidarity, it is important to understand that we are all connected. So is our liberation. We must have love of that which connects us all, whether our beliefs are spiritually or secularly grounded.

Let the love revolution begin.