Success Summit 3.0 and Outrageous Love Letters

Just back from the Success Summit 3.0 in Boulder, four amazing, heart opening days with business leaders, entertainment leaders, along with students of relationship – relationships among humans, relationship to the presence of God. It was a bit of a Trojan horse for some I’d imagine. We came to redefine success in 2015 and put that new definition into the culture. We found that to be successful we must find the kind of spiritual framework that allows for, or even inspires transformation and growth. This essay is about my growth. There will be others concerning what I got from the conference but this has to do with the Love Letters I’ve been writing, and took a break from, these last weeks. I learned something about what I want the letters to become.

You may or may not have noticed that I’ve taken a short break from writing these love letters. It has proved to be both a challenging and a beautiful practice. Finding that space within myself that seeks what is beautiful and expressing love and gratitude every day is easier said than done. Sometimes the pressures of life itself, those daily pressures that keep us distracted make it hard. But it is amazing how making an effort to open yourself to love every day brings up those deeper fractures, the life trajectory pains and traumas. These two conspire to make it hard to find that heart space you need to find if you’re to write the kind of love letter I want to write. That is of course, the point of the practice and so I get it, I must pick up my pen again and open to that space every day, whether I feel inspired or not.

But there is something else going on here in the midst of this love letter practice. It’s been showing itself more and more these last couple of weeks and it feels important. Maybe it’s happened as a result of the writing I’ve done thus far, maybe it’s because I feel Spirit calling me to crack open, or is it break down, and surrender my desires, my hopes, my dreams, altruistic though they may be, and sit in the presence of the One whose love defines us all. I guess I’m saying that I’m pretty good at imagining what love is supposed to be – some of these letters are pretty damn good at it. But no, there is something more that I’m after. The love that I’ve been offering here is a kind of appreciative love. We could call it eros – that is, I see something and want to enjoy the value in it which is fine; nothing wrong with that. That yearning could be described as the evolutionary impulse that drives all there is. But there is a greater dance of love than that. I’ve written before but not felt before, (at least not in this way), the importance of agape in the dance of love. Agape is seeing an object and wanting to put value into it. It is a creative love. My friend Marc Gafni talks about the “love before creation,” I think that’s it. And while he uses the word eros to define that, I prefer agape. (I don’t think we really disagree; I’m just emphasizing a dance between the two partners where Marc seems to use eros to describe the whole dance itself.) Neither by itself will get us much of anywhere; it’s the dance that does it. For the yearning we feel for what is next is essential to drive us forward. But that creative word, that love that begins before desire, before creation, that impulse to love without return, but just love in order to love, is something I aspire to. It is, I’ve come to understand the Outrageous Love that Marc has been getting at.

The letters I’ve written to date are letters with eros at their heart. They have expressed that gorgeous gratitude and love I feel when I consider the beauty and complexity of God’s gorgeous creation as it is expressed in the people I know – or sometimes that I don’t know. But I’m after more than that now. I want to express that love before creation, simply that impulse to love for love. I’ll keep writing now. Some of the letters will undoubtedly reflect an erotic love, that is, that part of the dance of love that is about yearning and enjoyment. That is likely to be so precisely because it is a dance. But my aim is to find that space within that simply loves – the love before creation, before gratitude, the love that fills us with eros and lets the dance begin.