Love isn’t always easy, kind or peaceful

Love is valuing the quality of letting something bigger and older than you mean more to you than your comfort. Care for a loved one is a lot like that. A sign of a good heart is its capacity to be wounded by the love that brings it joy. 

Love is telling a friend off for care’s sake. Love is being straight up for the good of your friend, even if that puts their love for you at stake, even it stings. Not for the pleasure of telling them off, but really for the long term good of the friend. Love is difficult conversations made easy, but also letting some conversations silently pass with the changing times. 

Love isn’t always peaceful. Sometimes love is revolution, a love of freedom in the face of oppression, a love of life in resistance of the onslaught of death. Love is also deposing a regime corrupt to the core with a bloodthirst for power over the life and death of another; violently if need be. Love acts for all our sakes; to liberate the persecuted beloved from tyranny, to free the hearts of the occupier from the poison of their power. A tricky little feature of love under duress is that if we misidentify the tyrants as the persecuted and the revolt of the persecuted as tyrannical, we grotesquely deform the Love whose name we fight for. If Love without context now justified us to depose the revolutionaries whose hearts are defaced by the poison of hatred, we fail to recognize the historical dynamic of persecution, the revolutionary love of life that underlies the hatred of oppression, as well as the coagulating blood boiling for destruction behind the tyrant’s mask of weaponized love.