Agape means love for another self not because of any lovable qualities which he or she may possess, but purely and entirely because it is a self capable of experiencing happiness and misery and endowed with the power to choose between good and evil. The love of humans is thus more than a feeling, it is a state of the will.
God's love, and hence the love with which we come to love God, is eros and agape at once: a desire for the other that delights in the distance of otherness.
My teenage children watched Senator Clinton on the Today Show, mouths agape. They attended our local caucus with me and saw hundreds of our friends and neighbors gathered in the elementary school gym on that Sunday afternoon, despite an ugly Maine snowstorm. They listened to the thoughtful searching debates and saw us cast our votes. How could anyone suggest we didn't know exactly what we were doing? 'What's the point of electing someone who doesn't believe in the American people?' they asked. 'If she wants to ignore us now when she's only a candidate, what will she do as the President?'
Agape is the catalyst that makes value appear in anything.
Agape love is. . . profound concern for the well-being of another, without any desire to control that other, to be thanked by that other, or to enjoy the process.
There must be a stronger foundation than mere friendship or sexual attraction. Unconditional love, agape love, will not be swayed by time or circumstances.
Divine love, agape, is self-sacrificing love, which sounds difficult, as it is, and not very attractive. If the best image we have of love is of a man who's been tortured and hung upon a cross to die an excruciating death, this is something that human beings find very, very hard to understand as love. But it is the highest Christian image of love.
