The long doing of it

What is something you used to believe about love that you no longer believe? The old texts almost never describe love the way we do — as a weather that arrives. They describe it as something one does, in particular places, on particular days, to particular people.

There is an asymmetry, when you read across traditions, between how love is felt and how love is recorded. We tend, in our century, to speak of love as an inner condition — a tide, a chemistry, a thing one falls into. The older books rarely speak this way. They speak of visiting. They speak of burying. They speak of not turning a neighbor away when you have bread in the house and could give it now. The Epistle of James, in one of the most stringent definitions ever written, says: "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world."^[1] No mention of feeling. The whole content of religion, in that sentence, is two verbs and a destination.

This chapter follows that thread — love as something done — through several traditions that rarely meet but agree more than they would expect.

Love as a verb

Proverbs is blunt about procrastinated kindness: "Say not unto thy neighbour, Go, and come again, and to morrow I will give; when thou hast it by thee."^[2] The wrong is not in failing to give — it is in the deferral, the small dishonesty of putting off what is already in your hand. A similar urgency runs through 1 John: "whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him? My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth."^[3] Not in tongue. The line is almost impatient.

The rabbis say it more domestically. The first chapter of Pirkei Avot offers a household policy: "Let thy house be wide open, and let the poor be members of thy household."^[4] Membership, not charity. And in the Analects, there is a small, almost throwaway sentence about Confucius and his friends: "When any of his friends died, if he had no relations who could be depended on for the necessary offices, he would say, 'I will bury him.'"^[5] Burial is not romantic. It is what you do for someone you loved after they can no longer thank you. Several of these traditions, in fact, prefer love that cannot be repaid, and we will return to that.

What unites these passages is a refusal to let love hover. It must land. Ecclesiastes puts the rationale in its plainest possible form: "Two are better than one… For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up."^[6] We are practical creatures who fall down. Love is the arrangement by which we get back up.

Whom to love — and the hard answer

If love is a practice, the natural next question is: practiced toward whom? The traditions answer, almost embarrassingly often, toward everyone, including the people you would rather not.

The Tao Te Ching says it twice in different keys. "To those who are good (to me), I am good; and to those who are not good (to me), I am also good; — and thus (all) get to be good."^[7] And again, of the Way itself: "Even men who are not good are not abandoned by it."^[8] The Dhammapada describes the awakened person as "tolerant with the intolerant, mild with fault-finders, and free from passion among the passionate."^[9] And in the Sermon on the Mount, the same posture takes its most famous form: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you."^[10]

The traditions are not, however, naive about this. There is a strand within them that admits love is seen, not generated, when the self is loosened from its preferences. The Gita describes the seer who "sees in all alike / The living, lordly Soul,"^[11] and a few verses later names the kind of person God loves: one "from arrogance exempt, / Exempt from love of self, unchangeable / By good or ill."^[12] Universal love, in this view, is not a heroic stretching of affection but a side effect of seeing clearly.

And yet — to let one contradiction stand — the Tao Te Ching, in a different chapter, asserts that "In the Way of Heaven, there is no partiality of love; it is always on the side of the good man."^[13] Impartial, and yet on a side. The traditions do not entirely agree, and we will not flatten them. Loving your enemy is not the same posture as standing with the good against the wicked. Both have been called love. They may not be the same thing.

The reciprocity that makes a society

Beneath the harder commandment to love enemies is a softer, almost mathematical one: that we are made of each other. Marcus Aurelius gives it the bluntest image: "A branch cut off from the continuity of that which was next unto it, must needs be cut off from the whole tree: so a man that is divided from another man, is divided from the whole society."^[14] Hatred, in his account, is not a wound to the hated one but to oneself: "he that hates and is averse, cuts himself off from his neighbour, and knows not that at the same time he divides himself from the whole body." Elsewhere he reduces this to a single line that any beekeeper could verify: "That which is not good for the bee-hive, cannot be good for the bee."^[15]

Confucius arrived at the same insight from a different angle. Asked for one word to live by, he answered: "Is not RECIPROCITY such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others."^[16] Jesus stated the positive form: "all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them."^[17] But Confucius pushed further. The good person, he said, does not stop at avoiding harm: "wishing to be established himself, seeks also to establish others; wishing to be enlarged himself, he seeks also to enlarge others."^[18] The yardstick is internal — "to be able to judge of others by what is nigh in ourselves; — this may be called the art of virtue."^[19] You already know how you would like to be treated. Start there.

And Marcus, who knew that human beings fall out of communion constantly, offered the most consoling sentence in the Meditations on this score: "once cut off we may grow together and become part of the whole again. But if this happen often the misery is that the further a man is run in this division, the harder he is to be reunited and restored again."^[20] Reconciliation is real. It is also rationed by use.

Choosing the company that shapes you

Love at the universal scale is one thing. Love at the scale of the particular friend you walk with on Tuesday is another, and the traditions are surprisingly tactical about it. "Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men," says the Dhammapada.^[21] Confucius is just as direct: "Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles. Have no friends not equal to yourself. When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them."^[22] This sounds harsher in English than it is — the point is that your friends will be the mirror you check yourself in, so choose mirrors that show you something true.

Pirkei Avot puts the same advice with more warmth: "appoint for thyself a teacher, and acquire for thyself a companion, and judge all men with the scale weighted in his favor."^[23] Acquire, in the active sense — friendship as something one goes out and gets. And of those one already has: "Let the honor of your friend be as dear to you as your own; And be not easily provoked to anger; And repent one day before your death."^[24]

Old friendship is its own discipline. The Analects records, of one man, simply: "The acquaintance might be long, but he showed the same respect as at first."^[25] Anyone who has been married, or held a friendship for thirty years, knows this is harder than it sounds. Familiarity slides toward contempt unless something pushes back. The Dhammapada offers a quieter image of what good company actually feels like: "If a man find a prudent companion who walks with him, is wise, and lives soberly, he may walk with him, overcoming all dangers, happy, but considerate."^[26] Happy, but considerate. A small and accurate phrase for the texture of long love.

Friendship also requires honesty. James writes: "Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed."^[27] The companion you can confess to is rarer than the companion you can drink with.

The debt you cannot repay

There is one love that is structurally unequal: the love we owe those who raised us. The Qur'an puts it with great tenderness: "Thy Lord hath ordained that ye worship none but him; and, kindness to your parents, whether one or both of them attain to old age with thee: and say not to them, 'Fie!' neither reproach them; but speak to them both with respectful speech; And defer humbly to them out of tenderness; and say, 'Lord, have compassion on them both, even as they reared me when I was little.'"^[28] The parenthesis is what undoes you — even as they reared me when I was little. A debt one cannot repay, only honor.

Confucius makes the point with characteristic bite. The filial piety of his day, he complained, "means the support of one's parents. But dogs and horses likewise are able to do something in the way of support; — without reverence, what is there to distinguish the one support given from the other?"^[29] Paying the bills is not the same as honoring. The Dhammapada notes, almost in passing, that one who reveres the aged gains "life, beauty, happiness, power."^[30] One suspects the gain is not magical. It is the gain of being the kind of person who can hold an inheritance gracefully.

The gift that asks nothing back

Finally, threading through all of these, is the strangest insistence of the wisdom traditions: that the purest love gives without wanting return — and without even the inner profit of being seen to give.

Jesus: "when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth."^[31] The Qur'an: "bestow not favours that thou mayest receive again with increase."^[32] The Gita distinguishes two kinds of giving — the gift "lovingly given, when one shall say 'Now must I gladly give!' when he who takes / Can render nothing back,"^[33] versus "the gift selfishly given, where to receive / Is hoped again, or when some end is sought, / Or where the gift is proffered with a grudge."^[34] The first is called fair; the second, stained.

Pirkei Avot categorizes the human heart with the precision of a botanist. There are, it says, four kinds of character: the one who says "mine is mine, and yours is yours" (a commonplace, or, some say, a Sodom-type); "mine is yours and yours is mine" (an unlearned person); "mine is yours and yours is yours" (a pious person); and "mine is mine, and yours is mine" (a wicked person).^[35] Note the surprise: the trader who says mine for mine, yours for yours — the fair-dealing modern, the libertarian of the soul — is grouped, by some, with Sodom. To merely not steal is, in this taxonomy, a low bar.

Marcus closes the case from a different angle. "When thou hast done well, and another is benefited by thy action, must thou like a very fool look for a third thing besides, as that it may appear unto others also that thou hast done well, or that thou mayest in time, receive one good turn for another?"^[36] The good act is its own benefit, to the doer as much as to the receiver. To want more is to misunderstand what one was doing in the first place.

And the Tao Te Ching ends, as it tends to, in a kind of disappearing act: the sage "acts without claiming the results as his; he achieves his merit and does not rest (arrogantly) in it: — he does not wish to display his superiority."^[37] To "act without (thinking of) acting; to conduct affairs without (feeling the) trouble of them… to recompense injury with kindness."^[38] Love, in its most refined form, becomes invisible to the lover. The right hand does not know.

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Across all these voices, something stubborn comes through. Love is what you do today, in this house, with this bread, for this person who may never thank you and may not deserve it. The feeling that may or may not accompany the act is not the act. The traditions disagree about whether love should be impartial or partial, whether one should choose friends carefully or open the door to all comers, whether the giver should think of return or empty themselves of even that thought. But they agree on one stranger thing: love is mostly the long doing of it. The feeling is a guest in the house that practice builds.

Questions for the reader

• What is something you used to believe about love that you no longer believe — and what specifically changed your mind?
• Whose burial would you arrange, if no one else did? Whose have you, in some sense, already arranged? What does the answer tell you about who you actually love?
• Is there someone in your life right now to whom you have said, in effect, "go, and come again, and tomorrow I will give"? What would it cost to give today instead?