Love and Caring  

Love and caring are the central values of a spiritual progressive politics.

One of the central goals of the NSP is to create a world that is safe for love, intimacy, and caring, a world in which these aspects of life are not undermined but supported by the economic, political, social, intellectual, cultural and media institutions of the society. Make the world safe for love, intimacy and caring! That should be at the center of a spiritual progressive politics."--Rabbi Michael Lerner

 

A glance at the quotes below shows why it is sometimes hard to define love--only possible to experience it. And yet, once people do experience it, they realize it is the most precious aspect of life. And what our spiritual traditions teach us is that love is not just a matter of lust or connection to one other person: we are enjoined (for existence, by the Bible) to "love our neighbor as ourselves," and to "love the stranger" (a Biblical command rarely acted upon by the fundamentalists who tend to love those within their group but to be sorely lacking when it comes to acting in a loving and caring way toward others.

"Attention is the most basic form of love; through it we bless and are blessed." - John Tarrant

"Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it, and it darts away." - Dorothy Parker

"Love is friendship set on fire." - unknown

"Love stretches your heart and makes you big inside." - Margaret Walker

"Love has no awareness of merit or demerit; it has no scale... Love loves; this is its nature." - Howard Thurman

""Where love is, no room is too small." - Talmud

"Loves makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place." - Zora Neale Hurston

"Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit." - Peter Ustinov

So love is abut a form of attention to others, a tenderness and forgiving attitude, a friendship set on fire, all of these and so much more.

Rabbi Lerner adds another dimension when he insists that "Love gives permission to leave the goal-directed, accomplishment oriented, material-possession-accumulating, daily life world of the struggle for survival in a capitalist world and to enter an experience of play, pleasure, humor, song and dance and art, joyfulness, ecstasy, sexual fulfillment, release from fear and from guilt, compassion for others and for self, and celebration of the awesome ineffable mystery of the grandeur of the universe and of our place within it.”

Imagine a world in which our economic, political, social and media institutions could give equal attention to fostering love of the sort described above as it did to accumulating money and power. It is the task of the spiritual progressive to help build such a world.