Well, I did dye my hair with henna, and now my hair is black, but not even the whole thing. So it’s half black and half brown, like I burnt the ends. I have to go all in now, so I’ll have a head full of black hair pretty soon.

I feel the impending nature of the holidays. Parents arriving. Presents to wrap. Planes to get on and hope everything goes smoothly. I have an anxiety around it all. I rather stay with my love here in Montana. I’m at the stage where it’s hard to pull away from him.

One more cacao ceremony

I have more critiques of the new-age community than positives at this point. Mostly because, truly, so much of it is bullshit. Spirituality has got to make a positive difference in your life. If it doesn’t, it’s not working, and faith without works is delusion.

I think about how many cacao ceremonies I was invited to. As though just a little more ethically-sourced, organic cacao was going to open my heart? I think about the people I saw in that community. What brought them there? Why was I there? I know I had a lot to learn, and to heal from, and I needed it at the time, but when it stops being useful and you know better, you move on. So why do people stay?

It begs the question, well, what do they want in their life? What is the goal? What are we all searching for?

Beyond the spiritual materialism, and generally, I think, a culture of opportunism, I’m going to jump very quickly to say, and I think no one would argue, that it’s Love. Love in all forms.

But then we get to argue about what that even means. And that’s what I felt the new-age community did. I never actually got a clear sense of what love is there. What it means to live a life in love. I got a lot of shadow work. I got a lot of psychedelics and cacao ceremonies, but love? It felt like both everyone and no one was the authority on it, but I’m not sure I actually saw much of it going around.

I contemplate love a lot now.

It’s perfect for me, 1.) because I’m a romantic, and 2.) because it’s both so embodied and so philosophical. Is it access to your Christ self? Or is it kinky free hippy sex with a microdose chocolate and a bunch of people in a several-million-dollar home because we say it is? Is it reprimanding your kid? Is it gentle parenting? It even extends to how we think about nation-state borders. This is how deep our understanding and our application of love goes.

So, who has the authority on love these days?

Where am I supposed to look for the people writing about what it means to love? Brene Brown might have a piece of it. Mary Magdalene might have a piece of it. Maybe we’ll throw bell hooks in there too.

But is my interpretation of love the same as yours? Why do they differ at all? How is it possible to disagree on what love is?

The many faces of love

I’m guessing because love has always been more than one thing. Plato, in the Symposium, said love begins as desire for beauty (for what we lack) and evolves into something divine, a ladder that takes us from the body to the eternal.

Aristotle saw love as philia, a friendship rooted in virtue rather than need. Augustine said, “Love, and do what you will,” because he believed that right love naturally leads to right action.

Then Aquinas (one of my favorite philosophers) came along and wrote that to love is to will the good of the other, meaning love isn’t about feeling good, it’s about choosing good.

And in the modern world, Erich Fromm warned that love isn’t a sentiment to fall into, but a discipline and an art to be practiced: the active concern for another’s life and growth.

bell hooks said love is “the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” I think she and Aquinas would agree, even if they never sat in the same church.

In my thinking about this question, I read something by Bishop B.C. Butler, a Catholic theologian who helped interpret Vatican II.

Vatican II was the 21st and most recent ecumenical council of the Catholic Church, held in four sessions from 1962 to 1965, intended to update the Church's practices in relation to the modern world and bring about major reforms. It was convened by Pope John XXIII and was seen as a landmark event. Because of Vatican II, Mass all over the world was finally allowed to be conducted in local languages.

In his interpretation of the ecumenical council sessions, Bishop Butler wrote an essay called “The Authority of Love.”

In it, he makes a distinction between two kinds of authority: the authority of constraint and the authority of appeal.

Constraint is what governments and laws rely on. It’s the threat of punishment or the fear of being wrong. It’s the kind of authority that says, “Obey, or else.” It’s fear-based. I think most of us revolt at this kind of authority (I know I always have).

Appeal, on the other hand, is the kind of authority that great teachers, artists, and lovers have. It doesn’t force you to follow; it invites you to. You respond to it freely, because something in it calls to your conscience; calls to your soul.

Conscience here meaning: “The inescapable requirement to make a response.”

Butler says that God’s authority (and therefore the Church’s) should never be about constraint. It’s about appeal. Because he writes, “love cannot succeed by constraint; it can only reach its aim by appeal, by courtship, by wooing.”

That line is illuminating.

It means the authority of God, the authority of Love itself, is not one of domination but of invitation. God, the Universe, Great Spirit, doesn’t threaten us into love. He calls us into it and leaves us free to respond.

Butler even says that to encounter real love is to face a moral responsibility: you’re free to reject it, but never free to pretend it doesn’t call you.

In his words, the voice of love speaks directly to conscience, and our only real requirement is the free choice to answer it. Hell being the place that arises as a natural consequence to turning away from love.

But what I think is really critical here is the implication underneath it all: Butler is describing love as its own authority. Meaning love doesn’t borrow legitimacy from law, church, a person, or culture. It is the innate, divine order and design.

So when you truly love something or are loved by it, you don’t need to ask for a rulebook on how to treat it. The rules naturally emerge from the relationship itself. You protect what you love. You listen to it. You make space for it. You bring it flowers and clean up its room after you make a mess.

That’s what it means for love to be the authority.

It’s not found in a group or a cacao ceremony. It doesn’t need to be preached or taught in a workshop because it reveals its own moral order only from within.

Augustine said, “Love, and do what you will,” because real love already contains its own boundaries.

Sourcing

This is where I see my own need for external validation is really strong, and why I found myself in the new-age community I was part of.

I didn’t have love at the center of my being, and so my own inner authority, sourced in love, was offline.

When that happens, it leaves you thinking: Am I understanding love right? Who can confirm or deny it for me? What tanta-kink facilitator can explain love so I can adopt it as my own, validate it, and belong? Maybe I need to “open my heart” with a cacao ceremony (I’m shitting on cacao ceremonies, but they’re also really very fun).

And I think this is where the deepest parts of our spiritual practice come: we have to trust our own inner authority, sourced in and guided by love.

Because when we outsource the authority on love, we look for a referee. Some self-proclaimed expert, or guru, or therapist, to define it for us. We allow some random person to say “this is what love is” in all their weird, perverted, traumatized ways that they’re also trying to validate and belong through.

When in truth, love itself is available to us all from within, and alone it governs.

The work then is not to keep seeking constant reassurance for something that is built strong only through embodiment. It’s to deepen in self-trust and individual sovereignty. 

And with love as the inner authority, all you have to do is listen for it.

Because with love as the authority, everything else (morality, decisions, ways of life, even faith) finally has a center that holds.

Love,
Val

I’m writing every day right now. If you missed one or want to see what’s been written before, click below.