Writing: What is love? How is it healing?

Consider the dimensions of love and the way Hooks

grapples with them. Why is an understanding of love important for the healer? Can love be
described?
What are the different types of love? Does it have any place in the healing environment?
Consider the ways your society portrays love. What does it mean for love to be healthy,
and if there is a healthy love, what is unhealthy love? Is love present in/supported by your
healthcare system? Should it be?

Intro

Affirming “all you need is love” sixties and seventies

“When I travel around the nation giving lectures about ending racism and sexism, audiences,
especially young listeners, become agitated when I speak about the place of love in any
movement for social justice. Indeed, all the great movements for social justice in our society
have strongly emphasized a love ethic. Yet young listeners remain reluctant to embrace the idea
of love as a transformative force. To them, love is for the naive, the weak, the hopelessly
romantic. Their attitude is mirrored in the grown-ups they turn to for explanations.”

“The woman’s mourning song,” was about the loss of a loved one and the refusal to let death
destroy memory. Contemplating death has always been a subject that leads me back to love.
Significantly, I began to think more about the meaning of love as I witnessed the deaths of many
friends, comrades, and acquaintances, many of them dying young and unexpectedly. When I was
approaching the age of forty and facing the type of cancer scares that have become so
commonplace in women’s lives they are practically routine, my first thought as I waited for test
results was that I was not ready to die because I had not yet found the love my heart had been
seeking.” (M

“Only love can heal the wounds of the past. However, the intensity of our woundedness often
leads to a closing of the heart, making it impossible for us to give or receive the love that is given
to us. To open our hearts more fully to love’s power and grace we must dare to acknowledge
how little we know of love in both theory and practice.” (E)
Arnold Arnez
Professor Picayo
REL 261
November 27th, 2019

In Bell Hooks’s All About Love, the thesis seems far too simple for the topic: that love

can be all pervasive and we need it to live a life that has value. For it to be all pervasive places

love within all aspects of our lives, from simple gestures that affirm one is welcome to a space to

the revolutionary ideologies that carrying with them centuries of objective historical analyses.

Yet, through all these, love is a factor to why these come to have meaning, and how both

examples are actions towards growing value to life; a life worth living. These two criteria open

up love as healing, because, without love, we can never experience the world as having intrinsic

value and, thus, never feel healed.

Love makes apparent the foundation of how we as humans heal: we are in need of others.

The art that Hooks would pass by on here trip to Yale opens up a public display of love that

gives a message to a stranger who may need to see and hear its words ‘The search for love

continues even in the face of great odds’ (2). The stranger who reads this is always within the

mind of the artists who, having felt the power of these words for themselves, sees the stranger as

equal to the artist and open to the care chosen in making that message. For Hooks, reading these

words came at a time of great strife after a break-up with a long time partner. However, the

words display an affirmation of one’s pain and that they, yet, still, matter enough to deserve love

and have the strength to find it. The graffiti opens up the artist, too, to wanting to share what they

have learned and can offer to others in their time of need. Without others to see the art, it means

nothing. But, for those who see the art, it creates community from the meaning it creates,

especially when the meaning is one that seeks to uplift others.

 Love has become progressively individualized in this contemporary age, being relegated

to the realm of false love in both political environments and in self-help culture. The political

realm marks love as an infantile naïveté that does not contend with the gravity of political

oppression that permeates in history and now. Even many social justice circles, which emphasize

understanding for all those that are considered deviant and other, follow the line of realpolitik.

Social justice becomes a war that seeks to achieve the goal, making solidarity movements

moments of temporary solidarity, though the start of this politics was the “idea of love as a

transformative force” which brought one to fight for a group larger than oneself (12). On the

other hand, self-help culture prioritizes an unwavering, yet, solitary love, seeing communal love

as cheap and a hiding away from one’s authentic self. This love forgets that humans are social

people who are dependent on others to survive for their skills and labor, but also for their

affirmation and an innate care for others. Each examples misses the what is needed from the “All

over the world people live in intimate daily contact with one another. They wash together, eat

and sleep together, face challenges together, share joy and sorrow” (229).

What one’s communal love does is open up the universality of love itself, and the salvific

power it has for others as with oneself. To confess, to give and receive apologies, to be

recognized, all give others a chance to not carry the burden of pain that life truly does have to

offer people. It gives one a second chance, as well as the chance to not define oneself with the

temporal pain that is washed away after death, but the unity one feels with the divine as with the

community. Life comes to have value when realizing “LOVE REDEEMS” and that “DESPITE

all the lovelessness that surrounds us, nothing has been able to block our longing for love” (238)

which can be found in one communing with the divine or one communing with others who

accept oneself and show them they have a place in the world.