From The Boston Globe Magazine, February 9, 1986

"One of the problems with the way social scientists write about love is that they underplay its grounding, centering role in our lives. Often what experts end up writing about is not love but what gets in love's way. Psychologists write about love as infatuation or addiction, as obsession or jealousy. Or they write about the symptoms or tools of love and mistake a part for the whole.

"Love is a relational force with immense, global, physical, mental, and spiritual effects. My sister, a pediatric nurse and mother of four, began her nursing career by learning that when babies with the dire and downward-spiraling syndrome called 'failure to thrive' were admitted to the hospital, the recommended form of treatment was love. Their ailment, which could be fatal if left unattended, was insufficient love. Once they started to feel the love of their nurses, the babies started to gain weight, smile, explore the world—in a word, they started to live.

"But love and the lack of it have the same immense, global, physical, mental, and spiritual effects on adults as they have on babies.

"If you insist on pinning love to a single other word, that word has to be 'life.' We human beings experience and enjoy our vitality by loving and being loved."

Reprinted courtesy of The Boston Globe.

Editors' comment: This crucial link between love and life is certainly evident in the treatment Christ Jesus provided for those who sought him out. One gospel account says that when Jesus saw the multitude, he "was moved with compassion toward them, and he healed their sick" (Matt.14:14). When he wept just before he raised Lazarus from the dead, those around him said, "Behold how he loved him!" (John 11:36).

But perhaps we're still underestimating what love is if we think of the Master's compassion as the exceptional emotion one lone man felt for humanity. Love that cures an epileptic, brings sight to someone born blind, and life to a man who has been entombed for four days, could only have been the divine Love that Christ Jesus knew and exemplified. This universal Love, God, which is also divine Principle, is the fountain of our life. No wonder love is being recognized nowadays as a form of treatment! As the writer of I John explains, "Every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God" (4:7).

This column will appear from time to time, offering a second opportunity to think about today's news and commentary—in the context of Christian Science.