The practice of active love flows from the core principle that “The Law is Love.”
In a legal context, a law is a rule or set of rules that provides the fundamental framework for addressing or preventing harm. It defines what constitutes harm, what obligations parties have in avoiding harm, and what response is made when harm happens. In science, a law describes attributes of the way the universe functions, as in the laws of gravity or thermodynamics. Spiritual laws prescribe what is right or moral. People often believe them to be associated with their specific religious beliefs, yet there are many consistencies across the boundaries of different faiths. The statement, “the law is love,” works on all of these planes: legal, scientific, and spiritual.
Love Is Always in Relationship
One who loves, always loves another. Love operates in relationship. To evaluate and choose your actions through the law of love is to center yourself on relationship. It means asking, “which actions can I take to facilitate stronger, healthier relationship? Am I engaged in any actions that separate relationships or make them toxic or harmful?” Actions that move stakeholders towards healthier relationships contribute to justice and peace.
Love Is the Foundation of Justice
We call for justice to address harms but many have a faulty understanding of it. Some demand retribution and punishment in the name of ‘justice.’ Retribution and punishment use harm to address harm, and therefore cannot functionally repair or prevent harm. If these methods succeed in anything, it’s to impose a limited degree of control over the harm, to make it more predictable, or to deflect it onto less powerful people.
Justice is often also commonly understood as an objective system of fairness, determining what someone deserves. This belief lacks awareness of the inherently subjective nature of deciding what is ‘fair’ or who is ‘deserving’ of what kind of treatment. Groups with the most power in a given social system will define what is ‘fair’ and ‘deserving,’ according to a myopic perception based on shared experiences and characteristics. Those with different life experiences and characteristics, belonging to groups with less power, become disproportionately accused, convicted, and sentenced. ‘Fairness’ as determined mainly through the perspective of the powerful is another form of violence inflicted on those with less power.
Harm Damages Relationship
Whether criminal, civil, or social, harm damages or destroys the ability to be in open, safe, or productive relationships with others. This concept can be applied at an individual level, to social groups, and on a macro level to nations and the largest conflicts in our world.
On an individual level, an injured person’s pain and disability change their role and relationships in the home, workplace and community. On a larger scale, a group targeted by hate is cut off from a relationship of dignity and respect with others in the society. Economic injustice causes refugees to separate from their homelands, and move to a new place or culture where they may live in tension with their new neighbors and have to build all new relationships.
An individual causing harm often acts out of trauma from prior relationships that have not healed. Peoples engaged in war, genocide, hate, terrorism are severed from their enemies, and the trauma from historical experiences contributes heavily to the violence in present ones.
A contract dispute is a disagreement about a specifically defined relationship, whether it is a service agreement between businesses, or a treaty between nations. To ‘make someone whole’ is not really to supply them with monetary compensation, as many lawsuits seek, but to either restore prior relationships or support new transformational ones.
A Legal System Based in Separation
Justice only succeeds in repairing or preventing harm, when the response to harm is determined with care for the life, need, and relationship to the community of each stakeholder. Legal scholar Peter Gabel noted that our present laws generally foster separation, not community. Even our cherished human rights are designed to protect us from each other, not lead us into better relationship. In his book, Another Way of Seeing, Gabel writes,
“…the Bill of Rights does not aspire to connect us to one another but to protect us against each other, against the community’s interfering with our right as isolated individuals to speak, to assemble (if as disconnect monads we can find anyone to assemble with), to be secure in our homes (those supposed havens in a heartless world), and even to keep others from taking away our guns. Indeed, the current preoccupation with “the right to bear arms” is an example of a highly visible appeal to the Bill of Rights…that reveals how clearly its protections equate individual freedom with fear of the other rather than connection with and love for the other.” [1]
At present, our concept of justice is not formed for supporting relationship, community, or growth. In general, our societies do not expect it to be. Gabel further illustrates this in his description of our present court system:
“Our legal culture declares that disputes are to be resolved through an adversary system that defines differences as antagonistic clashes of conflicting interests, fosters hostility, mutual deprecation, and lying, and rejects any moral objective that might inform the process beyond the parties’ own objectives, beyond their self-interested goals. Protection of the “rights of the individual” is thought to require that each side treat the other with skepticism and mistrust, to demean the other’s position while exaggerating the virtue of your own, to use cross-examination to undermine the testimony of even those you believe to be truthful, and to conceal any information that might be harmful to your side unless your opponent extracts it from you under the penalty of perjury…” (Gabel, 2013)
The court system is only one piece of one justice system that people live under. For a society to live by the law of love would mean that this, as well as most other parts of the government organized justice system, and also justice systems within schools, workplaces, families, and more will need to structurally change. It is an enormous undertaking. But if we can envision how it can pragmatically function, then we can shape and expect a different process.
Justice Can’t Wait
The need for justice is urgent, while cultural and institutional change seem both daunting and slow. When lives are on the line, we need to use systems and tools we have now. Throughout this series, as shifts in understanding around the law of love are explained, pragmatic tools and applications will be offered for taking action under the present circumstances. Here are three practices based on what has been shared so far:
1. Feed Relationship, Starve Separations
Observe your reactions to injustice. Do your words, actions, body language, or thoughts feed separation or relationship? If you don’t know how a healthy relationship can form with someone, then, provided you’re safe, try to avoid feeding further separation and watch for potential pathways to open. In the meantime, tend and invite others to relationships that offer healing, solidarity, or growth.
2. Shift your language
Our culture is so steeped in violence that even our peace language relies on violence to describe itself. Watch for when you use the language of dominance or violence and practice choosing differently. When facing a personal challenge, must it be a battle, or can it be a struggle? Instead of fighting someone as you speak out, could you engage in the powerful act of bearing witness? Shifting language allows more potential for people to find ways to relate to each other.
3. Return Again
Even if you are dedicated, you will almost certainly feed separations and use language of violence many times in a given day. Like athletic training, or playing an instrument, return to it often and keep practicing!
[1] Gabel, Peter. Another Way of Seeing: Essays on Transforming Law, Politics and Culture. Quid Pro Books, 2013.