About Love: A Conversation

In December, 1990, I was on the verge of divorce. Despite unimaginable stress at home, for a college class final project, I managed to write about the assigned topic: love.

That collapsing marriage, my first one, was to a man I met in the fundamentalist cult, The Way, when I was eighteen and he was twenty. Our cult-saturated union ended in April 1991 when I was 39 years old.

Divorce wasn’t easy, like most people tell you, and for me it had been a longtime coming. If you’ve read my memoir, Undertow, you know this.

Isn’t it odd how divorce, a breaking apart of a committed relationship, can possibly be the only loving thing to do?

Fast forward to this month, March, 2021, as I’m celebrating my first date (in 2000) with the man I married two years later: Hoyt Edge. A second chance at a committed love is a gift to both of us! This post is to honor love.

What is love?

The following fictional conversation was the final project I already mentioned. It was for a Rollins College Philosophy class in 1990 not taught by my now-husband, Dr. Hoyt Edge, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Rollins College; I was an English major in the Hamilton Holt School evening program who took a bunch of Philosophy classes. I didn’t meet Hoyt until 1994.

In the conversation, you’ll see references to various authors’ works interwoven with my personal details, including references to the cult my then-husband and I escaped with our daughter in 1987, which, in this paper, is called a “ministry.”

A list of those references is at the end.

Now, I’m happy to resurrect from my old files a …

Conversation on a Lakeside Path About Love

by Charlene Bishop (married name at the time)

Persons of the dialogue: a Philosophy student (P.) and an English Literature student (E.)

P.   Yesterday before we left, you were wondering again about what love is. Have you come up with anything yet?

E.   Well, I think love is just going on when I don’t feel like it … like when I have a headache …

P.   Oh.

E.   It’s what keeps me going day after day because I don’t want to not be living.

P.   What do you mean? What does love have to do with not wanting to not be living?

E.  Well, it would feel like death for me to not love or feel loved. I would feel like a cold stone, just existing. Love is all I see that is worth being alive for: loving people and doing what you love.

P.   How would you define love?

E.   I read a book called The Road Less Traveled a few years ago. It said something that’s stuck with me since then. The author, Scott Peck, said love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. I like that.

P.   Do you suppose emotional well-being is part of that?

E.   Yes. I also believe it means valuing myself, accepting myself and believing I have intrinsic worth. Then I can value someone else in a relationship. But it has to start with me, with how I treat myself.

P.   What about loving things or loving certain activities? Do we really love them, or is it better to say we like them?

E.   Do you see that sailboat out there on the lake? The breeze is gently pushing it along in the sun. It’s clear and bright out here, too. I love this! Love is big enough to include all the things we find beautiful. But after all the talks we’ve had about love these past few weeks, I think love is too big to define. Do you remember what I said about being “in love?”

P.   Yes. You said you think you are “in love.”  That was quite a while ago now.

E.   Back then I was very confused about whether or not I was “in love” with my husband. That’s pretty sad considering we’ve been married seventeen years. I was feeling guilty about not feeling like I thought I should if I were really “in love.” You helped me see that the friendly, human, caring and sweet love is what sustains a relationship. Love has to do with being care full.

P.   I see caring for someone as being enthusiastic about them, too. Did you know that enthusiasm about life and the people and things you’re drawn to, have to do with your being “in God?”  Enthusiasm in Greek means “in God.”

E.   Wow. Remember I told you that for a lot of years I was reminded constantly of the phrase in the Bible that says, “God is love?”

P.   Yes.

E.   I’m not sure I understand that, and I don’t think of it much now, perhaps because I don’t know what God is.

P.   What was God to you then?

E.   He was revealed in His Word, which was defined as the Bible. The ministry I was in taught He was a loving Father, but I was supposed to stand approved of Him by “rightly dividing the Word of Truth.”  That just meant finding its [the Bible’s] accurate meaning [by] utilizing the methods the ministry taught. They said if I did that I was doing His will in addition to loving people. The simplicity of life got lost in all the do’s and don’ts there. I slowly began to question the basic assumptions and presuppositions that their biblical research was founded on. After promoting it all for about fifteen years [by then] I guess it was about time, wasn’t it?

Anyway, one question just led to another, then another, then still another, until I found myself on the outside looking in. The whole rug had unraveled from under me. At that time, the only thing I held to was my daughter’s hand. What did you say this questioning is called?

P.   The dialectic. Dialectics is like cross-examination to discover truth. Certain assumptions are revealed, and when they are, they don’t work anymore, usually. A new worldview comes about from it.

E.   Yes. Now I remember … you used the word mythos for worldview or belief system, didn’t you?

P.   Bullseye. So, what did you do then?

E.   I sort of drifted or floated, like Tristen [from the Tristen and Iseult myth about romantic love] you mentioned. Since I had given up “the cause”—the ministry—I figured I’d be my own cause for awhile and see what happened.

P.   So … school?

E.   Yes, I went back to school; I needed to sort things out and think … think without so much censorship. My first writing teacher really cared about me. She could see I was searching. She even recommended I read that book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, [by Robert Pirsig] but the title sounded so weird I didn’t get into it, then. She didn’t push me, though, she just let me breathe.

P.   What happened to your concepts of love and God in all this?

E.   I decided I’d just love myself and my family. I also had two close friends left. Most everyone else [from the ministry] thought I was possessed with devil spirits for leaving the ministry, which was the same as turning my back on God. I just let the world go by and focused on living each day as it came along. The simplest thing seemed to be doing that; I quit worrying if I was doing what God wanted me to do or whether He loved me or not.

It was too hard to imagine being loved by an unseen force that wasn’t there to hold me when my heart was breaking back then, or a spiritual force that could look in my eyes and encourage me in that dark hour. Since you’ve explained “projection” to me, and how the gods are real, although incorporeal beings that are in me, I feel different. I had been labeling them as symbols, but that’s just another way of saying they’re not real. A new kind of spiritual life seems truly possible for me now—one from my heart and not my head.

P.   That sounds a lot different for you from what you were into before.

E.   It’s also very ironic. Even six years ago, I would have labeled myself devilish for talking like this.

P.   What about that phrase, “God is love?” What do you think about it now?

E.   I see it the other way around: love is God. Where love is, God is.

P.   How do you recognize love?

E.   I trust I’ll know it when I see it. If someone is being manipulative, hopefully, I’ll know it. Now that we’ve talked about love and seduction [manipulation] over the past few weeks, I’ll better understand what’s going on in my life and be more perceptive. If someone isn’t emotionally healthy, I don’t believe they can love well; I hope to see that more clearly, too.

P.   So, being emotionally healthy is part of love?

E.   I see it like this: in a balanced person who loves himself, love would be spontaneous; caring would be natural. It’s gentle and caring, not pushy. When I think of loving someone, I think of cherishing them, feeling they are special to me in a deep way, and one way to show that is by remembering details about them … what they like, don’t like. My daughter does not like Brussel sprouts, liver, or doing her laundry; she does like to dance and talk on the phone. But deeper than that, I try to tune into her and remember she likes me to just listen and not lecture.

P.   I see.

E.   A long time ago, I taught children’s fellowships in that ministry. One book I found about loving children pointed out how important it is to give them undistracted, focused attention to help them feel they are important, accepted, and truly loved. In The Road Less Traveled, Peck says, “the principle form that the work of love takes is attention.”

P.   So, what or who you love, you pay attention to …

E.   And the most common and important way in which we can exercise our attention, he says, is by listening.

P.   I like that.

E.   When we brought up Pirsig’s book [Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance], all the inquiry into Quality, paying attention to details, and recognizing quality reminded me of so many pieces of things I knew or felt to be true. I wish I had read it sooner, but I wasn’t ready for it. Not until now. I see that. And all that really happened to him?

P.   Yes. He put all that life and energy into searching for what Quality is, discovering [that] aretê is Greek for excellence; it originally meant that, and not virtue in the sense of being right or wrong, true or false. Quality is beyond that.

E.   It puts things in a different perspective for me. Life has more unity when I view it from Pirsig’s position … a respect for wholeness, he said … the wholeness of life.

P.   I wonder how quality is related to God?

E.   I’m beginning to see it as God at work.

P.   Hey, do you hear that flock of geese in the distance? They’re flying south now, you know. That’s so beautiful to me—part of God’s work. They call to each other as they fly. Do you suppose that’s what we do when we’re on the quality track, as Pirsig describes it? When we love? Our love calls to another as we fly by in life, moment to moment.

E.   Ah … the poet speaks …

P.   Okay.

E.   Oh, I brought you something today. It’s a quote I like. It seems to relate to making quality decisions. I’ll read it to you. It’s from The Tao of Psychology:

“Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore, you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path: If you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity, you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or leave it must be free from fear or ambition … look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary.”

P.   Love does involve decisions, doesn’t it? It is effortful. It’s also recognizing when it is time to let go, as well.

E.   It would be.

P.   Today, I brought something for you, too. It relates to detail, attention, caring, and being in the moment … here.

E.   Thank you. Ah, a poem! What a surprise. “Watering the Horse” by Robert Bly.

How strange to think of giving up all ambition?

Suddenly I see with such clear eyes

The white flake of snow

That has just fallen in the horse’s mane!

I wonder if ambition is related to seduction?

P.   Let’s save that for another day. Look, the boat is drifting to the dock, since the breeze had died down. Let’s go in now, too. We can go round the path again tomorrow.

E.   Good idea.

—-THE END—-

Works Referenced: I still love these books !

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck. (Simon & Schuster. 1978)

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert  M. Pirsig (Quill, William Morrow. New York. 1979)

We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love by Robert A. Johnson (Harper and Row, Publishers. 1983)

The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self by Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D. (Harper and Row, Publishers. 1979)

Thanks for reading!

Your writer on the wing,

Charlene