The art of loving

Ndiphe olo thando

Ndibathande bonke

Ngomphefumlo nangenqgondo 

nangamandla onke

Almost ten years ago I got my first tattoo: Luthando eyona nto, Love is the greatest. Not only did it mark my body, it marked who I was becoming. My first tattoo co-incided with me leaving the church and trying to figure out spirituality and who I am for myself. I had been raised in the church; I knew all the hymns and scriptures but something didn’t feel right. In leaving the church I knew I wasn’t leaving God—or rather God wasn’t leaving me—but I was leaving the church version of God which did not make any sense with the spiritual experiences which had led me to God when I was in high school and my childhood. I had experienced God through the love I received from others. I knew God existed because I had seen people choose love. So in leaving the church I took with me some of the gifts I needed to navigate the new experience of seeking for myself and the importance of understanding love has been an enduring part of seeking.

By marking my body with these words I was reminding myself about what I knew for sure: Luthando eyona nto. I wanted to distil for myself what my spiritual journey was about outside of the rules of Christianity. Later I learned I had chosen the hardest parts of who I am because I struggle with love: loving myself and loving others. And perhaps this is the starting point for being able to be a seeker and pursue the art of loving.

In the process of ending a long-term relationship I was led back to bell hook’s books All about love. I had read the book a few years ago because a friend of mine could not stop talking about it. I read the book as I did any other book because I was not yet ready to deeply engage with what the book demands; a cracking open and realising that in fact, we know very little about love. Hollywood movies teach us that love is a feeling. Growing up in a dysfunctional family prepared me to learn how to survive and it was through my relationship with my sister that I began to understand love. It is impossible to write about love without writing about my greatest teacher in love.

Like most sisters we fought when we were growing up. We grew up as twins because the age-gap is just under two years.  I remember the moment when things changed. I was in primary school. I think she was in Grade 8. It was my birthday and no-one had remembered it in my family. My parents had ceased being present and my sister had begun to realise that we had to become each other’s emotional support. Around 7pm I noticed her rummaging through the magazines she’d collected. She was standing in the kitchen paging through looking for something. I assumed she had a school project and I decided to let her be. A few moments later she called me to the kitchen (together with our bath time, the kitchen had become the only place we could speak in whispers away from our parents because we lived in a one-roomed apartment with no privacy). She handed me a folded piece of paper and inside were two chocolates; a heart-shaped chocolate and a star-shaped chocolate melting in the February heat.

The piece of paper was a picture from her glossy magazine; two models standing alongside each looking into the distance. She had scribbled on top of the picture a message which began with the words: “I was actually looking for a picture of two-peas in a pod which symbolises what you are to me”. The rest of the message explained the significance of the shapes of the chocolates and how we were like two-peas in a pod. It was my first lesson in love from my sister because until that point it had simply been implied that she loved me because we are family. She was inviting me into a relationship that continues to grow in our adulthood. My sister has continued to be my greatest teacher in the art of loving. I have watched her show up for herself, her family and the children which have been entrusted to her with the kind of courage I am still learning.

The art of loving is an ongoing meditation. It is a practice that is counter-culture because it requires that we take nothing for granted. I have been drawn to other people’s words which remind me that love is a practice that has nothing to do with our feelings but rather a life-long pursuit which begins with self-love. Below are two pieces of writing which have shaped my experience of being a student of love this year:

I saw this on Instagram a few months ago and knew I would keep coming back to it.

“Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body like robins or bison or maybe you believe love is how forces or nature or luck is benign to you in particular not maiming or killing you but if so doing it for your own good. Love is none of that. There is nothing in nature like it. Not in robins or bison or in the banging tails of your hunting dogs and not in blossoms or suckling foal. Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn - by practice and careful contemplations - the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God-carefully. And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. A diploma conferring certain privileges: the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it. How do you know you have graduated? You don't. What you do know is that you are human and therefore educable, and therefore capable of learning how to learn, and therefore interesting to God, who is interested only in Himself which is to say He is interested only in love. Do you understand me? God is not interested in you. He is interested in love and the bliss it brings to those who understand and share the interest. Couples that enter the sacrament of marriage and are not prepared to go the distance or are not willing to get right with the real love of God cannot thrive. They may cleave together like robins or gulls or anything else that mates for life. But if they eschew this mighty course, at the moment when all are judged for the disposition of their eternal lives, their cleaving won't mean a thing. God bless the pure and holy. Amen.” 

― Toni Morrison, Paradise