Agape For The Hard Times

There's a distinction that Greeks made that English collapses into a single overworked word.

We only have the word love for a spouse, a hobby, a country, a god, a stranger dying in a bed you've never seen before today.

The Greeks had several words, and the one I wanna spend today on is the word agape.

Love that doesn't depend on affection, attraction, or even familiarity.

Love as an act of will extended towards someone simply because they exist and are suffering, whether or not you have any personal fondness for them, whether or not they can give you anything back.

I think agape is the load-bearing concept underneath chaplaincy, the specific work I do sitting with people who are dying and with those left behind after someone dies.

I wanna talk about why, because I think naming it precisely changes how sustainable the work can be.

Here's the problem agape solved, and it's a real problem, not a theoretical one.

You will walk into a room over years of doing this work with people you have no natural affection for, people who are frightened and unkind about it, people whose theology or lack of one is nothing like yours, people dying alone because everyone who might have loved them stopped or stopped showing up years ago for reasons that were probably fair.

If your capacity to show up depended on liking the person or on some spark of personal connection, you'd burn out fast, or worse, you'd start unconsciously rationing your presence.

More warmth for the easy patients, less for the difficult ones, without ever admitting that's what's happening.

Agape doesn't ask to manufacture affection you don't feel.

C.S. Lewis, writing about this centuries after the Greeks, called it the gift love as opposed to the need love.

Love that gives regardless of what it gets back, as opposed to love that's really an appetite for connection dressed up as generosity.

Agape is love you can extend to someone difficult to love precisely because it was never contingent on likability in the first place.

That matters enormously, 'cause our work does not get to select for people who are easy to sit with.

Agape is the kind of love built for exactly that condition.

Agape as love can extend to someone difficult to love precisely because it was never contingent on likability in the first place.

It's closer to a decision after discernment repeated moment to moment than a feeling you wait to arrive.