Whatever your feelings about Valentines Day (it’s ok to love it or hate it or have multifaceted and contrary feelings about the day, the commercialization of affection, the focus on only one type of love, or the heteronormativity of it, or any other of its issues) it is a good opportunity to reflect on what Love is and what Love is not! The concept of Love, especially in the church, can be used as a cover for prejudice, passivity, or complicity with evil. How can we decipher between Love born of the Sacred and “love” that is a cover for evil? The Love that flows from God always liberates from evil, always leads to ultimate flourishing, always furthers the Spirit of Life.
1- Love cannot be bought or sold – it does not make a profit.
Love does not hide from truth.
Love dives deep.
Love takes on flesh.
Love is queer.
Love is platonic.
Love is erotic.
Love is asexual.
Love confronts evil.
Love delights in pleasure.
Love touches and weeps and flirts and feeds and creates.
Love is risky.
Love challenges systemic evil in all its forms.
Love is simple but not easy.
Love is collective.
Love rises up.
Love apologizes.
Love believes.
Love corrects.
Love holds accountable.
Love pays reparations.
Love heals.
Love tells its story.
Love embraces everyone, every creature, every creation.
It knows us intimately. It holds us collectively.
Love transcends every boundary that seeks to confine it.
It will not tolerate violence in its name.
It does no harm.
It only sets free.
— or
2- Resist the nonsense that narrows and abuses and individualizes
and profits off of love…
Love your friends.
Love your people.
Love collectively.
Love justice.
Love truth.
Love your body.
Love the soil and the air and the water.
Love wisdom.
Love the earthy, creaturely, planetary.
Love queerly.
Love vulnerably.
Love deep.
Love by respecting boundaries.
Love by growing.
Love through risk.
Love through solidarity.
Love through mutual aid and redistribution.
Love by listening.
Love by paying attention.
Love by holding accountable and inviting accountability.
Love strangers.
Love by encouraging.
Love generously.
In whatever ways practices of love are discouraged by forces of dominance, ways that threaten their stability and make possible collective flourishing…love those ways the most.
– Rev. M Jade Kaiser, enfleshed