REVOLUTIONARY LOVE

“Love” is more than a feeling.

Love is a form of sweet labor: fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving;

a choice we make over and over again.

If love is sweet labor, love can be taught, modeled, and practiced.

This labor engages all our emotions. Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love.

Anger protects that which is loved. And when we think we have reached our limit, wonder is the act that returns us to love.
“Revolutionary love” is the choice to enter into wonder and labor for others, for our opponents, and for ourselves in order to transform the world around us.

It is not a formal code or prescription but an orientation to life that is personal and political and rooted in joy.

Loving only ourselves is escapism; loving only our opponents is self-loathing; loving only others is ineffective.

All three practices together make love revolutionary, and revolutionary love can only be practiced in community.

Revolutions do not happen only in grand moments in public view but also in small pockets of people coming together to inhabit a new way of being. We birth the beloved community by becoming the beloved community.

When a critical mass of people practice together, in community and as part of movements for justice, I believe we can begin to create the world we want, here and now.