By Ajung Sojwal

Over the years, my understanding of love has gone through several revisions. From experiencing love from my parents, siblings and extended family as a child to a place where I have had to examine and revisit my love for my husband, my children, my extended family, friends, the church and God, again and again. Suffice to say, I have begun to see love as more than an emotion. Today, love for me is more like a teacher, or maybe a sculptor, and maybe, it is the Advocate Jesus was talking about in his farewell discourse with his disciples. 

The call to love as a spiritual discipline and an act of faith is embedded in all of Jesus’ life and teachings. In many ways, my faith walk has been all about unlearning and learning what love entails. In the process, I have wrestled a great deal with my own motives and priorities when it comes to understanding genuine love, which has meant letting go of my own imaginations of love and being fully present in the moment with someone where they are. It is the stuff of incarnational love, the kind that changes you. I suspect, Paul had to do a lot of unlearning to come to the place where he could pen that glorious description of love in 1 Corinthians 13. That kind of love does not come easy nor is it discovered in all its fullness in some corner of  my heart. It is nothing short of cultivation that calls for intentionality, practice, discipline, courage, and hope that I and the other in all my relationships are being cared for and changed in the hands of a loving God. 

The older I get the more I realize that love isn’t so much about what I feel for someone as it is about how free someone can be in my presence. I have had to learn this from my own experience of feeling pressured to be something or the other with some people in order to maintain relationships. To be changed by love is not about becoming something other than who I am, it is to bring out the best in me. I know the people with whom I can be fearlessly myself, the people with whom I not only know but feel beloved in their presence. 

Surely the best in us can’t be that we have allowed our love of God, love of country and love of whatever to become the rallying cry to demonize all who disagree with our definition of love. I yearn for and want to learn and practice the kind of love that’s able to leave everything and everyone else aside for a moment and be fully present with the one who happens to be with me, to gaze into their eyes, to take in the wonder of their lives, the uniqueness of their being, the sorrow of their struggles, to listen and really hear their voice and hope for us both to experience true belonging that give us hope for our deeply fractured world. 

Ajung Sojwal is the Priest-in-Charge of All Saint’s Episcopal Church, Palo Alto, CA. Ajung and her husband moved to the Bay Area after serving for many years in churches in the New York, Connecticut and New Jersey area. Ajung is passionate about conversing and learning to engage in community as the incarnational Body of Christ in a suffering world.