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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
The conceit of the social worker: “We're all here on earth to help the others. What on earth the others are here for, I don't know.”
W. H. Auden, The Dyer's HandWhat does it mean to live in love? If we think of love as something wider than sexually erotic attraction, we will see that experiences of “falling in love” – with friends, books, professions, preoccupations – are far more common in our lives than a narrow fixation on romance will lead us to believe. We never choose love, pick it from a menu of equally viable, equally distant options; we discover that we are already in love, already mixed up with the other, our fates intertwined. Only then, after we discover we are in love, our voluntary agency plays a role; for then we must decide what to do about our newly recognized condition.
What does it mean to try to live in God's love and in love for others, within this dispensation? What does it mean to try genuinely to live with others, not just nearby them, during the world? Properly speaking, human love is participation in God's agapic and kenotic attention to and delighted “waiting on” creation, a love most centrally oriented for us towards the neighbor (Vanstone 1983: 115). But today, during the world, such love is hard to imagine in its fullness; even those little loves that we manage to inhabit often seem to exist only as long as they stand out against the cooler, more callous, and less profound relations.
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