Journal of Sacred Work

As you continue to send out love, the energy returns to you in a regenerating
spiral… As love accumulates, it keeps your system in balance and harmony.  – Sara Paddison

From whom did you learn love? Your mother, your grandmother, your father, a friend, a complete stranger, your own child, a group?

I first learned love from the woman in this photograph. She turns ninety-four today, August 21, 2006. Along with my three siblings, I am unusually to have my mother still here on this earth at such an advanced age. Her early mother’s gifts enabled me to receive love from other, later, givers. And hopefully to learn to give love myself.
   We can all say about our mothers that without them we wouldn’t exist. But that is, in part, a comment on biology that covers fathers as well. Most people experience love in the very first moments of their lives from the person who carried them within their own bodies for nine months or so. Our mother’s love comes to us as she holds us against her in our first moments. But our mothers are not always the turning point people in our lives…

   Some are unlucky. They either lose their mothers at birth, are born
through women who find it difficult to love, or are put up for adoption
and learn love from someone else. So where else do we learn love? Who
taught you to offer kindness beyond your own needs?
   Since caregivers are the ones who love those in need, today is a day to contemplate those who have taught love by giving it to you.

   During a gathering of former prostitutes at a retreat for an organization called Magdalene, I learned something new about love. In a circle sat about twenty-five women, most of them former prostitutes and drug addicts tracking the path to recovery. I asked each of them, "From whom did you learn love?" Several women shed tears as they recalled grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, and whole neighborhoods that had taught them love.
   Toward the end, one woman, a recovering prostitute and former drug addict in her early thirties gave an answer I’ll never forget. "No one ever taught me love," she said. "For me, love was something I sold on the street for $60 an hour. Then I came to Magdalene. She paused, looked around the room, "The first time I ever saw love was from these people," she said. "They did things for me and never asked anything in return. They were kind to me even when I wasn’t kind to them. I never felt love until I entered this community."

   Communities can teach love. And they can also reinforce it. Magdalene teaches love not by offering a course, but by living it and by giving it.

   If you have been lucky enough to receive love in your life and wise enough to live love every day, then this is a time to recall your teachers – the lovely men and women and children who helped you know that you were, and are, loved.

   Imagine the people for whom you have been the one who taught them love. And think of all those
who may yet receive the gifts of your heart.

   You are a child of Love. And a caring mother’s love remains among the most beautiful early examples of kindness as she gives herself to a helpless one in need – the contact with her skin, the soothing tones of her voice, her warm embrace.    

   Love that comes later can be complex and hard to comeby. Yet we long for it  at our most vulnerable moments. Perhaps this is why hardened soldiers, wounded in the middle of battle, call first for their mothers.

   Celebrate, today, your teachers of love. And be a teacher for others – not through instruction, but through example. Give away the most precious gift you have – and feel it circle back through you.