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“Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice.
Justice at its best is love correcting anything that stands against love.”
- MLK

Another extraordinary quote from Martin Luther King.  He keeps blowing me away.  His reference to justice and love, and the fact that tomorrow is Valentines Day which celebrates another kind of love, reminded me of old C.S. Lewis’ ‘Four Loves’.  For Lewis there were four kinds of love: ‘filial’, the love of friends, brothers and sisters; ‘eros’, romantic love; ‘caritas’, the love that gives to and serves where there is need; and ‘agape’, the exultative love that is an expression and experience of awe and wonder at the divine, at the astonishing unity of the cosmos.

MLK’s quote makes me think that ‘justice’ is a fifth love; how love expresses itself in a social and political milieu.

Catastrophic loss, intense pain, inconsolable grieving, wounds that will probably never really heal up… these are all right in the very heart of Life and drag us down much deeper into it’s deep and inexorable, remorseless, vibration.  When we try and find meaning in the worst of our experiences, we seem to be digging to discover, reveal, or create an interpretation of a really really bad situation in which there is a good ending.  It is a relentless and essentially heroic drive to derive something useful and helpful – a narrative which could enable us to face up to, and grow into, life even more deeply – from a situation which obviously seems to be robbing life away from us.

Tragedy is the raw rip between human attachments, and desires, and dreams and hopes, and Life’s relentless and remorseless flow.

Love, which requires both attachment and desire, also holds to Life. Love’s a taut singing string between the fallibility and temporality of our very human and personal wishes and hopes, and the basically merciless and opportunistic primordial evolving energy of Life itself, with its hungry and voracious appetite which will consume whatever it can, paying no heed to our ephemeral, all too human, needs and concerns.

Life goes on.

Love is the perennial impulse to render the worst that Life can afflict into a narrative on which we ourselves can feed, and so go on, and live on.

Those who are dragged down into the impetuous and incontestable current of really intense suffering, and who are rended by it, are wound more intimately into life, and become, in a myriad of separate ways, life’s renderers.