In those same newspapers are story after story of abused children, abused not by the stranger but by the ones who love them. Story after story of broken relationships; broken not by the emotion of love or lack of it; but broken by specific pieces of behavior. Indeed, the majority of divorces these days are applied for by women, and a very large number of them by women who are tired of the abuse that seems to come with the male role in marriage. There are wives who abuse their husbands, too; but women don=t seem to be as effective at it as we males are.

Again and again, problems around the world loom and somebody who learned it well in Sunday school says, "But if we could just love each other, all would be well." When I hear that, I think of those abused children and abused spouses and our rather significant failure in making the feeling of love turn into the behavior of being loving. The mistake is somehow deeply ingrained, to the point of being a cliche. That is, the assumption that somehow love has to do with the feeling that I have or that you're supposed to have toward me.

Anyone who has been in a long-term relationship knows that "feeling" ebbs and flows. The expectation is that the minute I notice that I don't have that passion of love in my ault divorce lawyer forthwith and trade the spouse in on one with whom I do have that wonderful, consuming passion.

How many of us, male and female, despite the fact we promised to love and honor and, if we're old enough, maybe even obey, have found that despite the marriage relationship we find ourselves being really turned on by that lady over there and initiating a conversation? From there we slide into a relationship, and it's exciting, and it=s titillating. Among other things, I don't have to deal with all of the baggage I've got with my partner. So there is a spark and a freedom and an excitement to it. I say, "Aha, I'm obviously no longer in love with that person. I'm clearly now in love with this person." To be true to myself I must act on this feeling and abandon the commitment of how many years and rush into a new one.

I am in the habit of saying to the couples who come to me to get married, "Please explain to me, given the odds of success of the institution on which you seem to be launched, why it is you want to do so hostile a thing to someone you say you love !" Sometimes I don't get very good answers.

In the Epistle of St. John, the author says that "God is love." St. John's is on target. "God is love" was one of the major pieces of the early church gospel. It was so much a part of it that it also forms a major piece of one of the early heresies. There was a group called the Antinomians (those who are against laws.). Their understanding of the Christian gospel was that Jesus' teaching and his life said that the old law was now set aside. Now, only love is the law in religion. This was held to be a heresy, not because the early church was not founded in the notion of love but because the Antinomians kind of got carried away with it. You can abuse even a good thing. And they, too, had some difficulty distinguishing between love and lust.

The love that St. John and the early church were talking about is not the adolescent passion for another. It is not eros, but agape being talked about. You are familiar with the old saw that the Eskimos have many, many words for snow and we have only one. We have the same problem in translating all of those old words into the single word "love." We have lost the nuance of meaning that the several words make possible. Love, as it is spoken about in the New Testament is not about eros. It=s not about that passion to possess, that response that comes over me unbidden to approach, to be in the presence of, hopefully to be able to stay always in the presence of, and to immerse myself in the joy and delight in the other. It is rather about agape, the unconditional appreciation and approval of the other to the point that I exist on behalf of the other. All of the sundry motivations for being a human being become focused on nurturing the best, the most joyous in the other irrespective of, even despite, what it may or may not do for me. Agape love includes also not merely the desire to be in the presence of and to possess but the willingness to let go. One of the hardest things for me, as a father, was the letting go. I had no difficulty loving my children. Letting go was a harder thing. Those of you who have tried it know what I mean.

There is a sense in which, indeed, eros is the problem to which agape is the solution. Agape recognizes that we are connected, and that letting go does not--cannot--break that connection.

The tangled relationships that we find ourselves wrapped in today at every level of the institutions that join us together have to do with our difficulty in separating out that notion of where the joy and delight, the desire, the pleasure is supposed to be focused on me. I am the one who is supposed to be made joyous by it. I am the one who is supposed to be made joyous by it. I am the one who is supposed to derive pleasure from it. If my joy and delight no longer is being stimulated by it, there is something wrong with it that somebody else needs to fix!

Eros calls forth the awareness of the connectedness, but it is the nitty-gritty everyday ordinariness of behavior that creates, nurtures and sustains love. Love is not a feeling. The feeling may have given it prompt; the feeling may have created a problem, the situation, the opportunity, the event. But it is the difficult decisions of how I shall respond, how I shall behave day in, day out, that makes love. Indeed, one of the things that ought to give us real pause about our interesting obsession in western culture with romantic love is the fact that the old way, where relationships were arranged by older, wiser, more experienced folk on our behalf, so often worked. They worked so often because love is, indeed, nor the consequence of that feeling, that momentary passion. Love (the feeling) is the consequence, the epiphenomenon that goes with, that goes with, love (the behavior).

For those of you who listen to Dr. Laura Schlesinger on the radio, here is Mother Laura=s advice: If you are in the midst of marital crisis, before you make any rash decision about that relationship, spend one full year pretending, behaving "as if@ you loved the other. Fake it !

That sounds weird. I'm not sure how many of you would be really enthusiastic about having your partner say, "Well, for the next year I'm going to fake It. Hard as it=s going to be, I'm going to actually act like reality. It is indeed out of those pieces of behavior, done day in, day out, the small pieces, the ordinariness of the life we share together, that the bonds are in fact built. The bonds are not based on the periods when the juices are flowing, We may engage in some of the rest of that ordinary, everyday behavior on the desperate hope that some of that passion will occasionally recur -- that would be nice -- but it is nor the passion that brings it, causes it, creates it, calls it into being.

It bothers me when I hear the cliche so often now, "We should just love one another." I hear, back of that, not the request to alter my behavior, but a request to manufacture an emotion. I am to call up somehow by conscious intent a particular balance of hormones in my bloodstream. I have never yet learned to turn my belly button two turns to the left and jump sideways and make that happen. But I have discovered in 36 years of marriage that the passion does come and go, and it has little to do with whether I deserve it. It has to do- with the fact that a partner said, "These things I will do, even when they're hard. I will not abandon this conversation merely because we disagree or find the going rough or difficult." Sometime in the past I said, "Yes:' and insisted upon hanging on to that "Yes" even when it felt like "No !' And with the behavior keeps coming moments of "Yes."