Quotables

#6

"Love is at the root of everything: all learning, all relationships; love or the lack of it."
- Fred Rogers

Friedrich Nietzsche once said that "what is done out of love, lies beyond good and evil."

I used to ponder about that quite a bit. "What is done out of love..." It seems almost stupid on the surface level, especially when one considers that most people see love as good.
'How can love be evil?'

Affairs, passion, war, degradation, affirmation, delusion: many evils have been done out of love. But is love itself evil? No. Is love itself good? No. Love is love, to borrow a modern cliché, but it goes deeper than just that.

When I was younger, a church my family went to taught that God is Love. Simple. Elegant. Poignant. Sublime. Truthful. God is Love; but what did it mean? God, like love, is often viewed as good, and yet so many atrocities have been committed, are being committed, will be committed in God's name, but let's not blame God for that. God has caused evil acts, too, let's not forget, but does committing evil make you evil?

If God is truly love, and love cannot be neither good or evil, then God is as well. God just is. And by ' God,' I don't mean the God of Abram, or the father of Yeshua, or the Allah of Muhammad, of the one Divine of Shiva, Brahma, and Vishnu, or the Godhead of Buddhism. God here, in this sense is Love, as in that thing we cannot describe, yet know so intimately well.

So why is this so? Could it be because love is greater than both good and evil? Think about what Yeshua said about your enemies: "But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you(.)" [Matthew 5:44] Love your enemy: it's not just a commandment; it's a declaration of the power of love, it is overwhelming, beyond boundaries, beyond ideas, beyond hatreds and differences, beyond beliefs and concepts — love your enemy, because there is no greater power than that.

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