"When you can stand before a man in full rage, ranting, raving, yelling, screaming, and look beyond the anger and rage to see the pain that drives it, and chose to Love him, and show him compassion in that moment, then you can say you know what Love is."
"When you can look a woman in the eye, who has betrayed your trust and your heart time after time, who even in that moment you know you cannot trust, and see her pain in spite of your own, and try to comfort and protect her, then you can say you know what it means to Love someone."
"When you can look at a parent that has let you down, abused their authority over you, belittled and demeaned you, denied you compassion and comfort, hypocritically expected more of you than they expect of themselves, rebuked you for what they do, and choose to Love them, care about their wounds and hurts in spite of those they have dealt you, then you can say you have it in you to Love someone."
"When you find that one you have trusted to do something for you, a subordinate, a friend, a sibling, or even a child, who you put in a position of responsibility, and let you down, and respond with gentle but firm rebuke rather than harsh recrimination, and still show compassion and sympathy for their own hardships and wounds, then you have shown another Love."
"When someone whose wounded heart you have tried to heal rejects you, when one who you have tried to aid and support but has thrown you out, stands before you, and you still care for their well-being, dignity, and worth, despite how they have rejected your empathy and aid, and try one more time, or at the least not attack them and respect their desire to be left alone, then you can claim you have some idea what it means to treat someone with respect, consideration, and Love."
"'Loving' someone who treats you well, or you have positive feelings for, is easy. Having romantic 'love' for someone you find attractive, or you have a crush on, and has no negative history to work with or through, is easy. Being friends with someone who has common interests and temperament to you, and that you have no real points of conflict with, is not so hard."
"Love, true Love, the Love that makes a life worth living, is sacrificial. The reason children becoming adults are so often alienated from their parents, is because they have grown enough in heart, and in mind, to clearly recognize that when this sacrificial Love is lacking, their parents do not genuinely Love them. That in the end, their parents consider themselves before their children, and children always take their first lesson about their value from their parents, or those who took their place if the parents are missing."
"Those who are so brokenhearted, find themselves fighting with their parents, perhaps to try and push the parents, somehow or another, into treating them with real Love. Perhaps it is simply to punish the parents for treating them poorly. Perhaps it is an attempt to wrest control of their lives from their parents. Perhaps it is to try and get their parents to see that something is wrong. Whatever the cause, if the parents fail to recognize what is wrong, eventually almost every child will lose faith in their parents, and become jaded and embittered towards them."
"After this, the child looks for Love, for that most fundamental affirmation of their value and worth in other places. Almost all spend at least some attempt looking for Love or a simple declaration of worth amongst their peers and friends, other authority figures, as they continue to mature they will most often seek it within romance. Some search within religion, but the majority of the time, regardless of what the teachings of the religion itself say, unless a person within that religion treats them in a genuinely Loving way, they will ultimately reject it."
"Some people get stuck in a rut, trying again and again to find the missing fulfillment from one romance after another, each of them failing in sequence; others get hung up being people-pleasers, trying to always be the socially desireable one, and find affirmation in the praise of peers. Some bounce from one religion to the next, or get caught up in one, and try to force themselves to fulfill its teachings to an absolute degree. Some few keep hunting for authority figures to take the place of their failed parents, and give them what they lack."
"In the end, most end up as either broken-hearted people constantly seeking what is lost, or embittered people who no longer believe in what their heart desperately craves, and become part of the problem, how they treat others in their bitterness propagating the cycle to others, and the next generation."
"Without Love, nothing will change."
((()))
AN: I wrote this after coming into conflict with some housemates; if you want, you can consider it to be something Lily Potter says after the end of Brutal Harry, something similar will be showing up in the sequel, even if it comes in a somewhat altered form.
To a Christian such as myself, the definition and embodiment of Love comes in the form of God, and Christ's sacrifice on the Cross. I won't put a full-out speech or anything here, but suffice to say, Christ set the example of being willing to die for others, even those opposed to him at the time. Real Love comes when you're not only willing to die for someone, but live for them as well, treating them with kindness, respect, and compassion day by day, even when they make it hard for you.
The need for this kind of Love is an absolute fundament of the human psyche, and something I will be exploring in more detail in the sequel of Brutal Harry, which I mean to start on once I've cleared either War in Tokyo or Cameron's Legacy off my writing plate.