Agape is the concept of the unconditional love that God, however you may conceive God to be, has for all humans, being. It is the divine bestowal of love that is selfless and altruistic. T he story of the Prophet Hosea in the Bible is a story of unconditional love. Hosea marries a prostitute and spends 30 years chasing her as she keeps running back to her old life. He goes and buys her back and still loves her even as she gives birth to children fathered by other men and dishonours his love for her repeatedly. It is the ultimate dysfunctional co-dependent relationship. We would all tell Hosea to give up on her, to let her go because she is never going to change. The story is ultimately one that parallels the unconditional love that God has for all people. We continually make mistakes and He continually goes and buys us back. He never gives up or stops believing in us and our value even if we have given up and stopped believing, or never believed, in ourselves and in his love.
As I have gotten older I realize that I don’t know much about love. I know how to love, how to give love and how to be a compassionate and caring person but I have never succeeded in an intimate relationship and I think it is largely because I am not very good at the I-love-you-oh-master-let-me-kiss-your-other-cheek routine. I have had relationships in my life where I was very in love and thought I was being loved back but I was wrong. I came to learn that at the exact moment in the relationship when I felt that the relationship was warm, familiar and comfortable with a strong underlying friendship, within two weeks of thinking those thoughts the rug was pulled out from under my feet. It was quite a source of consternation to me and left me with that flushed-from-the-toilet-of-his-heart-tossed-away-like-used-Kleenex-warm-place-to-jerk-off kind of feeling. Of course this was before I knew that you should never give a man what he wants. It destroyed something in me and gave me a sense of being dangerously unloved and unlovable. I am not a deceptive thinker and I have never been good at seeing deception in people that I love and trust. We learn something from every relationship we are and I think of it all now as lucky escapes but I was crushed. You will meet the Devil in the eyes of every person you give your heart to and you might not even know it.