The Intertwining Nature of Love & Respect

During a recent walk, a friend began talking about the challenges of marriage and a mutual friend's recent divorce.

My friend looked at the divorce as being triggered by a lack of respect. In his opinion, the spouses didn't respect each other. And it caused an atrocious downward spiral.

"You have to have respect," my friend said. "That's essential."

While I didn't disagree, I said that love was the basic element necessary. Not just in marriage, but in any intimate relationship.

The Oxford dictionary defines respect as "a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements." The secondary definition is "due regard for the feelings, wishes, rights, or traditions of others."

And, just so we're clear, the Oxford dictionary says that love is, "an intense feeling of deep affection."

Oxford continues on to include love as "a great interest and pleasure in something or someone."

My point was that, without love, it's impossible for respect to exist.

How could we respect a person without admiration? Or regard for that person's feelings, wishes, or traditions?

To me, love and respect are entwined and serve to strengthen each other.

The deeper the love, the deeper the respect - and the deeper the intimacy. Which, when you think about it, is one of the fruits of love.

We've heard so much lately about the lack of common courtesy. The lack of civility. This lack can take on many forms.

This past weekend, while helping out at a food distribution site, another volunteer and I noticed that a section of the brickwork along the entrance to the pantry door had been torn out. I wondered how that had happened. The volunteer said, "It looks like a car might have run into it... That's been happening a lot recently."

If that assumption were true, then that's a sign that someone was disrespecting the church building where the pantry is housed. And also disrespecting the folks who come to the pantry for food. 

As fortune would have it, I'm reading a book about hospitality (which includes feeding people who are hungry).

Art Credit: Redbubble

In it, the author, Christine D. Pohl makes the point that over the centuries, the act of hospitality has become disassociated with Christian service and is now the responsibility of social institutions (at least in Western culture). Pohl writes: "While it is clear that the household has been crucial to hospitality throughout almost all of human history, it is also clear that households today are in trouble. Families are unstable; often no one is at home. The future of Christian hospitality is partly tied to the future of the home and family."

Pohl's book was published in 1999.

Could it be that what is fueling the problems of respect, incivility, and family instability is a lack of love?

And if we begin to wonder where love comes from, then we might also consider:

- love is essential

- we can't live a healthy life, or have a healthy society without it

- love can't be forced 

- love has an emotional element, but it's also a decision.

Love binds our bodies, hearts, and spirits together. On a very real level, love has spiritual, emotional, and physical consequences.

So if we want to solve the dilemma of lack of respect, maybe love might hold at least part of the solution.