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Is sex the same as love?
No.
Yes.
…
I suppose a lot of qualifiers would be thrown in here: sex with someone you love as against sex with a prostitute and so on. You can say that sex with the former is an expression of love while the latter is just plain self-gratification. Then you compare it with a love a mother has to her child or the way you love doughnuts and ice cream and soon you have a scale of the greatest love, the not-so-great love and so-so love. Given where we are now in this mindf*ck, it will ultimately bump against (inspiring trumpet music please) the love of God.
We bring into the conversation C. S. Lewis, known as the author of “The Chronicles of Narnia” who also demystified things in a book neatly titled “The Four Loves”. He lists and describes the four loves, referenced off the Greek words used for love: storge (love of family), philia (love of friends), eros (uhrm … sex), and agape (for now let’s use the Christianese “love of God”).
Storge: love of family, maternal love. Strong here in the Philippines, blood is way thicker here than water. Think pancake syrup thick. Understand it and you understand Filipinos. God demonstrates this when he says “can a nursing mother forget her child…neither can I” and Jesus, on his way to Jerusalem—“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how long have I wanted to gather your children as a hen gathered her chicks under her wings.” It has one flaw—it can only love the member of the family. Of course, you can do a Romeo and Juliet, but that’s another story.
Philia: love of friends, friendship. Bound by common interest, no matter how trivial, but enduring. Jesus calls his disciples his friends. It is egalitarian—it treats the friend as an equal, and where inequality exist, it empowers. The weakest will become like the strongest. It has flaw too—it can only love the member of the gang. If you belong to another fraternity, you’re in deep shit.
Eros: love of beauty and of passion. Even if beauty is only in the eyes of the beholder. Passion because it drives one to pursue, even possess, the object of love. God sees his people as the “Bride of the Lamb” … so there. Flaw? It loves only the beautiful, and because no one stays beautiful, it is fleeting.
Agape: unconditional love—but that’s interpreting it from Christianese. Agape is unconditional because it does not have the prerequisite condition of the others (i.e., family, gang or beauty), it can rationally choose to love anyone without any condition. That is a more forensic description compared to when it is said, “in while we were sinners, Christ died for us.” All the conditions are absent but despite of that we are loved. But it has a flaw too.
It is boring.
Wait, what? Boring?
Agape has been romanticized in the Christian communities that you have teenagers signing off love letters with “Agape—[insert name] ”. Because of the association with God it is almost like the only deal in town. All other loves are lesser than agape, and eros being the least or even evil in the bunch. But it has been demonstrated in the bible that God can love like a mother, a friend and even like a lover.
In that sense, all can be said to be “God’s love”.
Agape gets elevated to its status because that was how God operated when it came to saving people. We cannot be saved on the basis of storge because it is said we are orphans or even children of the evil one. Or, on the basis of philia because we had a different interest, we were not friends. And we cannot be saved on the basis of eros because “our righteousness is like filthy rags”, as in…ugly. To go to the cross on our behalf, God had to make a rational choice if people were worth dying for.
The beauty of agape, it does not have to have a reason other than that choice.
That also makes it boring. It can be cold, calculating and rational.
But then…
Because we were agape’d, we are can now be storge’d—we are now part of God’s family; and we can now be philia’d—Jesus now calls us his friends. Because we were agape’d, we can now be … er … how do you make a past tense of eros? Whatever. God now considers us the his bride whom he waits for wedding feast at the end of days.
If all you know about is agape, then all you have is a purpose. But if you have storge, philia, and eros, then you have passion.
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