Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being “drawn toward.” Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one’s friends and enemies.
Love creates righteousness, or justice, here on earth. To make love is to make justice. As advocates and activists for justice know, loving involves struggle, resistance, risk. People working today on behalf of women, blacks, lesbi*ns and gay men, the aging, the poor in this country and elsewhere know that making justice is not a warm, fuzzy experience. I think also that sexual lovers and good friends know that the most compelling relationships demand hard work, patience, and a willingness to endure tensions and anxiety in creating mutually empowering bonds.
For this reason loving involves commitment. We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen. We are not love machines, puppets on the strings of a deity called “love.” Love is a choice — not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity — a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world, aloof and apart from human flesh.
Carter Heyward Quotes
Showing all text quotes
| Birth: | 22nd August, 1945 |
| Nationality: | Armenian |
| Profession: | Feminist, Priest, Professor, Theologian, Writer |
About
Carter Heyward was born in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is an American feminist, theologian, professor, author and priest in the Episcopal Church - the province of the worldwide Anglican Communion in the United States. She was awarded a PhD in 1980 for her work on redemption in the thought of two early Christian thinkers. She taught at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1975, and was Howard Chandler Robbins Professor of Theology there until she retired in 2006. She is the author of some eleven books, and has edited/contributed to a further three. She is the author of numerous scholarly and more mainstream articles.
Related Authors
Advertisement
Today's Anniversary - 18th April
Share with your friends