This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
I Want To Know What Love Is – Rev. Linda Jackson
DESCRIPTION
We all want to know what Love is. What if Love is more than what we have allowed? This week we open the month by exploring love not merely as a feeling, but as a living, expansive presence — available in the uncomfortable and the good, in the messy and the beautiful. The invitation is to begin expanding the container of love within ourselves, and to discover that we already are the fullness of what we seek.
SUMMARY
Rev. Linda Jackson explores the tension between our cultural longing to “know what love is” and bell hooks’ assertion that “love is our true destiny,” noting that many people believe in love’s importance yet feel unsure how to embody it. Drawing on bell hooks’ All About Love and M. Scott Peck’s definition, she reframes love from a passive noun into an active verb: “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth,” emphasizing that love is an act of will, intention, and repeated choice rather than a romantic accident. Hooks’ six elements of love—care, affection, commitment, trust, respect, and knowledge—are presented as a practical framework for accountable, responsible love, with the reminder that care or affection alone are not sufficient and that one “cannot love what you do not know.”
Rev. Linda contrasts these healthy understandings with popular songs that normalize possession, obsession, and stalking as “love,” arguing that such distortions fuel cynicism, which hooks calls “the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.” She insists that “love and abuse cannot co-exist,” rejecting any claim to love that involves harm, and links authentic love directly to justice, echoing Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of love as a powerful, non-sentimental force and “supreme unifying principle of life” that undergirds movements for social transformation. Integrating Jack Kornfield’s teaching on “conversing with the heart,” she invites listeners to move from overreliance on intellect and control toward inner guidance, treating the heart as a trustworthy source of intuition and core values.
Self-love is presented as foundational rather than selfish, requiring the same six elements directed inward—care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge—to heal past wounds and gently reopen closed hearts. From a Science of Mind perspective, Rev. Linda extends hooks’ view of love as practice to a deeper metaphysical claim: love is not only something we do but something we are, “the self-givingness of the spirit” expressing as all that exists, so that “love is the nature of Being itself” and always present as our essential nature. She concludes with an affirmation—“I celebrate all of me as the fullness of love”—and a guided practice inviting participants to notice where they treat love as a noun, where their hearts may be closed, and how they might choose one element of love to embody daily toward themselves, others, or the world, awakening to the ever-present love within.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Linda Jackson:
So thank you to the musicians as always. I’m Rev. Linda. I use she/her pronouns and that song gives voice to a longing. You can feel the angst and it reminds me of that time in my life when the music made me feel all of that or it actually encouraged that angsty feeling about love. And many of us have felt or do feel that “I want to know what love is”. And some of us have been asking that question our whole lives. We just don’t always say it out loud. And in the reading this morning, hooks said, “Love is our true destiny.” And then we hear that longing and they’re saying two different things, right? Love is our true destiny and I want to know what love is or I don’t know what love is yet. And most of us live somewhere on that spectrum, somewhere in between.
We believe that love is real. We believe it matters and we’re not always sure that we know how to get there. So we’re going to spend some time with that today. I am starting off our June theme Higher Deeper Love with bell hook’s book, All About Love: New Visions. But before we can go higher and deeper, we need to look at what we’ve already been taught.
So using bell hook’s book, All About Love, she says, “There are not many public discussions of love in our culture right now. At best, popular culture is the one domain in which our longing for love is talked about. Movies, music, magazines, and books are the places where we turn to hear our yearnings for love expressed.” And she opens All About Love by naming something most of us feel but don’t always talk about. As a culture, we’re obsessed with love and really confused about what it is.
There are no schools for love. It’s assumed we’ll know how to love instinctively. Though we have overwhelming evidence to the contrary, if we look around what’s going on in our world right now. Most of us learn about love or learned about or continue to learn about love from movies, magazines, music, our culture, right? And just about this time last year, I shared a few words from a few songs that show how historically we learn about love as unhealthy attachment, self-sacrifice, seeking validation. And the point is not to stop listening to music. It’s to just be aware so that we don’t normalize dysfunctional relationships. So you might remember I shared Diana Ross. I’m going to make you love me. I’m going to use every trick in the book. I’ll try my best to get you hooked. And then the Police, every breath you take, every move you make, I’ll be watching you.
So these misconstrued ideas of love, right? They describe possession and obsession and stalking as confused with the devotion of love. And funny, that Diana Ross and the Temptation song is still considered one of the greatest love songs of its era. That’s a love song. And hook’s names Tina Turner’s What’s Love Got to Do With It, which Rev. Aimee’s going to be sharing more about next week. She names What’s Love Got to Do With It as a cultural turning point. The moment that popular culture started dismissing love and she says, “Cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.” Cynicism is not the problem. It’s the symptom. Cynicism is what happens when you’ve been shown a distorted version of love and it keeps failing you, at least confusing you. The real problem is what we’ve been taught that love is.
Hook says it would be so much easier to learn love if we had a shared definition. She says the word love is most often defined as a noun, yet all the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb. Love as a noun is something that happens to you. You fall in love. You find love. You lose love. Love is something you have or don’t have. A verb is something you do, a choice you make, an action you take over and over, even when it’s hard, especially when it’s hard.
Hook spent years researching for a definition of love that felt true to her and she found it in the work of M. Scott Peck in the classic 1978 self-help book, The Road Less Traveled. She quotes Peck in her book. She says, “He defines love as the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Explaining further, he continues, “Love is as love does. Love is an act of will, namely both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”
So I want to let that land for a moment. We do not have to love. We choose to love. That’s not romantic. I’m going to scoot down so I can see Rob. That’s not romantic. It’s actually way more powerful than romantic. It means that love is not something that just happens to lucky people. It’s available to all of us as a practice, as a discipline, as a daily choice.
She says, To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility. Accountability and responsibility. What great words to associate with love. We are responsible for how we practice love.
She shares six elements of love: care, the genuine attention to wellbeing and growth. She’s clear that care alone is not love, and she talks about her childhood experience of feeling cared for but still not loved. You can care for someone without loving fully.
Affection, warmth and tenderness, which is necessary but not sufficient on its own.
Commitment, this is where it starts to get interesting. Willingness to stay present in love over time. This implies longevity. Love is a practice over time, not just a feeling in a moment.
And trust. Without trust, genuine connection cannot take place. Love cannot be established where trust has been broken or withheld.
Respect. Truly seeing another person, not as a projection of your needs, but as who they actually are.
And knowledge. You cannot love what you do not know. So genuine love requires the willingness to truly know and to be known.
She says, when we see love as these elements, we can work on developing these qualities or we can learn to extend them to ourselves.
I recently spent some time with an old friend and before I got together with her, I was feeling like, “Oh my gosh, there’s just so many triggers for me in that relationship.” And I love her. I have a deep feeling of care and connection. There’s history and I care for her. But I realized through listening to bell hooks that while I feel this love and depth of emotion for her, I’m not practicing love with her.
Those respect and knowledge pieces were helpful for me to consider, to truly just see her as she is and stop thinking she needs to be different. You cannot love what you don’t know. How can I know her better? So I had to pause with that and be with that. And I will say that I hope that she has a sequel to this book because I didn’t do a very good job. But it had me thinking about it. It had me be holding myself accountable and taking responsibility. So that’s a start.
So love is an action, an intention, a choice, and we are responsible and accountable for how we practice. And she goes on to say, “When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse cannot co-exist.”
I repeat, love and abuse cannot co-exist. You cannot claim to love someone while harming them.
We have love as a verb. Love as a practice that comes with consequences and we’re accountable for how we practice it. And then she goes a step further, connecting love directly to justice, claiming that all the great movements of social justice have strongly emphasized a love ethic. And we had Rohr from our book last month saying it all came back to love. We know, A Course in Miracles, says everything is love or fear or love or a call to love. And Martin Luther King understood this. Many great teachers understand this, right? Hooks quotes Martin Luther King, “When I speak of love, I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force, which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door, which leads to ultimate reality.
Love isn’t sentimental. It’s the animating force underneath every effort to be truly human with each other. And it drives every great movement for justice and that willingness to keep showing up with love even in the face of hatred. That is what transforms systems.
So hooks began her book with a quote from Jack Kornfield. “It is possible to speak with our heart directly. Most ancient cultures know this. We can actually converse with our heart as if it were a good friend. In modern life, we have become so busy with our daily affairs and thoughts that we have lost this essential art of taking time to converse with our heart.
We can speak with our heart to our heart to check in with it, to listen to it, to treat it as the trustworthy, intelligent guide that it actually is. The heart is not just emotions and feelings. In fact, some cultures view the heart not the mind as the center of knowledge. It’s intuition, our core values, unspoken truth we know the things we know before we know them. And modern life has made us very good at living completely in our heads, right? Constantly managing, producing, planning, responding. I’m asking, are you having time or making time to have the most essential conversation of all?
I may be reinterpreting this a little bit, but for me it feels like communing with the divine. The love within me knows and I can connect with that and receive guidance. There was a time in my life when I was really, really good at managing, planning, producing, getting so much done. One might even say manipulating. I didn’t think of it that way, but when something didn’t go the way that I thought it should, I would use my intellect, a different way of using my will and I would finesse the outcome. This was highly regarded in business. She gets stuff done, but then you have to deal with the consequences. It becomes a constant managing. And as I’ve grown spiritually, I’ve learned to let go, to not push, to allow my real work is to come from love and any actions that I take occur best from love.
I can always count on ease and grace in the outcomes.
I thought my slides stopped there. I was like, ” Oh, it’s going to be interesting. “hook says,” The light of love is always in us no matter how cold the flame.” So the light is always there. We don’t have to produce it or create it. We just have to turn toward it to sort of rekindle it. And self-love is the foundation because you cannot fully love others without first loving and accepting yourself. It’s not narcissism. I mean, my mom raised me to think you weren’t supposed to do things to take care of yourself. That was selfish. And it’s like, how do you take care of others if you aren’t taking care of yourself, right?
It requires the same six elements, the practice of care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge directed inward, directed to oneself. So I invite you to pause just for a second and consider where you are in relationship to yourself right now. Are you offering yourself care? Are you extending trust to yourself? Are you practicing respect and truly seeing yourself? Only love can heal the wounds of the past, but hooks says, “The intensity of our woundedness often leads to a closing of the heart.” That makes it impossible to give or receive the love that surrounds us. So I just invite you to consider where might your heart be closed right now in any area of your life? Closed to yourself? Closed to someone else? And what would it be like to open it just a little and let love in? We’ll take this into a little more practice later.
So hooks has given us a reframe from culture’s distortion of love to consider love as practice. And she said, “The light of love is always in us. And you know this is just a Science of Mind perspective. For anyone new here, Science of Mind is the foundation of what we teach and we just bring in a lot of other work to support it and to inspire us. Beyond love as something we do is love as something we are. Not something we earn, find, or perform something we already are at the very essence of our being. Ernest Holmes said, ” Love is the self-givingness of the spirit through the desire of Life to express itself.” The self-givingness of God/Spirit is Love expressing itself through and as everything that exists, including us. We are that expression. When we love in hooks sense, we are participating in the same impulse that created the universe. We are Life expressing itself through us.
Holmes answers hook’s question about what Love fundamentally is. Hook says love is a verb, something we choose and practice and Holme’s says, I believe he would say yes to that, and he would say underneath that practice is something even more fundamental. Love is the nature of Being itself. It’s moving through you. You don’t have to manufacture it. You align with it and practice opens the channel, but the love that flows through us is always there.
And from the reading earlier, she said, “My belief that God is love – that love is everything, our true destiny – sustains me. ” I don’t think that’s a destiny as in a destination to reach. I think it’s our destiny as it is already written into who we are. And this connectedness calls us to spiritual awakening, it calls us to love. The very act of turning toward each other with care, curiosity, a willingness to be known.
That is the awakening.
She says, “All awakening to love is spiritual awakening.” I love that. All awakening to love is spiritual awakening. You don’t have to go anywhere. You don’t have to earn anything. You just have to turn towards a love that is already within you. It’s already moving through you. It’s already your essential nature. Every time you choose love over fear, every time you extend care to yourself or another, every time you speak from your heart. So today we’re asking, are you able to let love be present in the uncomfortable and in the good? Not just in the easy moments, in the complicated ones, the uncertain ones, the places where love is asking more of you? And every time you practice one of those six elements, trust, care, commitment, respect, knowledge, responsibility, even in the smallest way, in the smallest way, that’s awakening to love. That’s the path to remembering the love presence that is already within you and it begins with offering love and acceptance to yourself.
You cannot fully love others without first loving and accepting yourself.
I’m going to begin closing with this affirmation. I celebrate all of me as the fullness of love. Not someday, not when I have it together, not when I’ve done the work, but accepting myself the good and the uncomfortable now as I am the fullness of love. I’ll say it again and then I’m going to ask you to repeat it with me. I celebrate all of me as the fullness of love now together. I celebrate all of me as the fullness of love. I invite you to consider a daily practice this week, taking time to speak with your heart as you would with a good friend asking your heart, “What do you need right now? Or what can you tell me? ” And then consider choosing one of the six elements to practice toward yourself, towards someone in your life or toward the world. Love as a verb, love as a practice, love as who you already are.
I’m going to move us into a little practice and then close us out with a prayer. So if you’re willing, I invite you to turn your attention within. Let me take a couple of deep inhalations and exhalations if you’re comfortable closing your eyes or taking a downward gaze, getting yourself anchored, using your breath or the weight of your body or whatever anchors work for you, bringing yourself into present awareness.
Just becoming the witness of yourself and directing your attention now to your heart space, to the love intelligence within you and settling in, just asking, is there a place in your life where you have been defining love as a noun? Love as something that happens to you, something you fall into or lose and what would it feel like to choose love as an act of will right now toward yourself, towards someone in your life, toward a situation, even in uncertainty and just asking, is your heart closed right now to yourself, to someone else? And what would it look like to open it? Just a little, to let love reveal itself.
The light of love is in you. It is always there. Even if, as hook said, the flame has grown cold, you can turn toward it. You can cultivate a greater feeling of it even in the midst of not knowing. Not someday, right now. Amidst the good and the uncomfortable. I celebrate all of me as the fullness of love.
I’m going to say it a few more times and you can say it within or say it out loud, whatever works for you. I celebrate all of me as the fullness of love. I celebrate all of me as the fullness of love. I celebrate all of me as the fullness of love.
The love you are seeking is already in you. It’s already your essential nature as I am as you are the fullness of love. So I acknowledge this one power and one presence that I know as God. I know it as love. I know it as life. You can call it any name you choose. There is no word that can fully contain it. And that love intelligence is operating in back of all life. It is the truth of my being. It is the truth of everyone hearing this word. It is moving through each of us, moving through this entire community right now. I claim that beneath any distortion of the definition of love, any cultural misunderstanding, that beneath our coping strategies, fears, that love is the truth of who we are. And I affirm that each person hearing this is held and loved exactly as they are. That the capacity for relationship and love is the very essence of our human nature, that we have everything we need to practice higher deeper love toward ourselves, toward each other, toward the world.
Letting go of every false definition of love, every closing of the heart dissolves right now into the light of what is true. Love is who we are. And as we consciously step into a greater expression of it right now, I am grateful for this community saying yes to this practice. I am grateful for the power of love expressing through us and the impact that makes in the world. I am grateful for the fulfillment of this prayer and I release it into the law that only and always says yes, I let it be so. And if it resonates with you, I invite you to declare it with me by saying, “And so it is.” Thank you.