Is Love An Action or a Feeling?
We can’t choose who we love any more than we can choose who we are sexually attracted to
A few years ago I got into a discussion with a friend about the nature of love. He believed that love was primarily a set of things that you do to be of service to someone else. While I can certainly understand behaving in a loving way to be one expression of love, I think that’s a really limiting construct with a lot of holes in it. You can behave kindly or in a way that is of service to someone you despise. You can also love someone who you never see or have no current relationship with — and therefore no opportunity to demonstrate your love through actions.
To try to demystify love and codify it into a series of behaviors is to discount emotions and to rob them of the richness and the power that they have. It’s often said that love is the most powerful force in the Universe — the actions that demonstrate love, but even more importantly, simply the emotion and energy itself. By some people’s estimation, this is what God actually is — the all-encompassing power of the feeling and not just what is made possible when we act upon it. This is not only a part of the Christian tradition but a part of contemporary spiritual thought as well.
