Love is a Feeling to be Learned

Ash Wednesday and Valentines Day Offer Keen Insights on Love

What changes in life is our understanding of love. We begin with our hearts in rapture and losing our footing on the ground.  We begin being smitten. We say, “I’ve fallen in love with you.”

As we grow and age, this love transforms to something deeper—something better, if we are fortunate and persevere.

But, as we live through many seasons and experience long droughts of summer and endless winters of longing, the roots of love are driven deep, if we stay with it.

Shallow beginnings do not endure unless the roots of love are driven deep. 

I’m not sure how we have made it.  There have been times when in despair, I did not think it could be. So, I offer no shame for those who fold in and move on. And I have not guarantees to offer or platitudes which might inspire.

Years ago, I read a book by Walter Trobisch titled, Love is a Feeling to Be Learned. (I highly recommend this volume because it is two of his best works in one!) Now, after all these decades of practicing this feeling to be learned, the truth of his book is more true, than before.  Isn’t that precisely what wisdom does?  Over time, we come to understand a more mature and complete understanding and our learning continues no matter what stage or age we find ourselves in right now.

I’ve been writing on Substack about my own greening—about my own personal time of an inner spring rising up within me.  But, today on Valentine’s Day 2024, Gwen gave me a hand painted card which she had made for me. I put the picture of the card above so you and see her work and why I was so taken with it. On the cover of the card, she painted a green, vined heart with leafy blossoms and new tendrils of growth sprouting.  She wrote these words:  “Love is greening old together.”

There’s much to be said about this greening season and in love greening as well. I hope more will follow this entry. Surely, we all need it.

Since, today is not only Valentine’s Day but also, Ash Wednesday, we are going to walk to our mountain parish for the 10:30am service where, together, we will kneel and receive the mark of ashes on our foreheads in the form of a cross.  It is just, so somehow fitting, that on a Valentine’s Day—that day where we express our love in card and chocolates, that we will mark ours by kneeling side by side and having our priest place the ashes on us. 

If love is anything at all, it is humbling.

Love is the invitation to humble oneself and realize that without our hearts inside, we would all, remain dust.

Yet, on this day, we can humbly say, “I love you” and mean it in a deeper and more grounded way than we have ever said it before.

My poem today, is my way of saying such things.  I start with Trobisch’s strong quote, “Love is a feeling to be learned,” and I unfold an understanding that only decades and scores of years can offer. Each of the stanzas is my attempt to put my own words into verse, the same way that thousands of others have sought to through all these millenniums.

The greening of love is what I hope for my Substack readers and friends—whether you are in love now or have been at one time. And in the greening of love, that our inner lives will become resilient and alive and that in the days of Lent ahead, we can practice resurrection.

For all the new Subscribers, welcome and welcome again. I write in two ways on Substack. The first way is what you’re reading here but then the second way shows up. Poetry is my way of expressing this soul greening happening in me. And I’m using Substack to invite my “Paid Subscribers” to be the first to read my entire work on these themes of caring for the soul. So, I encourage you to become a “Paid Subssriber” and you’ll get all the benefits and offerings. On 2/15, as an example, “Paid Subscribers” will be the first to be invited to register to the September 12-15, 2024 gathering with Gwen, me and Jimm and Kaylene Derksen. It’s a Soul Care Gathering. And you’ll see it here first.

So now, here’s my poem…