Episode Details

1. Summary:  Real love (agape) is given freely -- but it is not received freely in our fallen human condition.  Join me in this episode as we discuss the costs of opening our hearts to love\and the price of being loved fully, of being loved completely, in all of our parts.  We review why so many people refuse to be loved -- and we examine the psychological and human formation reasons for turning away from love.  Finally we discuss what we can do to get over our natural-level impediments to receiving love.  
2. Lead-in  
   1. I am a rock I am an island

I've built walls

A fortress deep and mighty

That none may penetrate

I have no need of friendship -- friendship causes pain

It's laughter and it's loving I disdain

I am a rock I am an island

1. I am a rock -- Paul Simon wrote it in 1965 and Simon and Garfunkel  Released it as a single in 1966, and it rose to #3 on the charts -- why because it resonated with people.  It was popular because it spoke out loud what many people's parts feel.   The desire to become a rock, the impulse to build the walls, to keep everyone out, to repudiate love and laughter, to not need anything or anyone.  
2.  Kate McGahan -- untitled poem 

I don't need anyone, I said.

Then you came

I need I need! 

I NEED YOU. 

I needed you.

What did you teach me?

Not to need you.

NOT TO NEED. -

1. I don't want to be in love, anymore. I just want to be left alone. And no, I am not depressed or something. No suicide is happening here... I am fine. Trust me. Sharmajiassamwale
2. So you want love.  But you also don't want love.  But you want love.  But you don't.  You do.  You don't.  You're conflicted.  How do you understand this conflict within you?  Can you and I understand this push-pull, this attraction - avoidance, this Yes and No within us more clearly.  Yes we can.  And we must.  Or we will wind up always skating along the edge of love, never really entering in.  And there are consequences for that -- and no one put it more succinctly than the English poet and playwright Robert Browning, who said: “Without love, our earth is a tomb”  
3. Intro
    
   1. We do want to be loved, but we don't.  Why?  Because we want the benefits of love, but we don't want the costs
4.  
   1. The Benefits
       
      1. To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.  David Viscott
   2.  
      1. If you don't have that memory of being loved, you are condemned to search the world for something to fill you up. -- Michael Jackson
5. 
   
   1. The costs.  
      1. Real love is given freely, but it is not received freely in this fallen world.  
         1. Almost no one talks about the costs of being loved.  I find that so strange.  People don't think this way. 
         2. There are costs to receiving love, to accepting love, to allowing love in to our hearts.  
         3. It's painful to be loved in this fallen world.  
            1. this is not well understood by many people, especially those who are not in touch with trauma, or who haven't suffered as much as others 
               1. Bernard Brady's 2003 book "Christian Love: How Christians Through the Ages have Understood Love 
                  1. Second sentence of the book, in the preface:  "Loving seems entirely natural and being loved seems wonderfully good."
                  2. Not to many people
                  3. RCC member -- so glad you can discuss tolerating being loved.  

1. Real love -- Agape -- burns away things that are sinful within us -- it doesn't coexist with the vice within us.
    
   1. Bernard Brady: Christian Love, p. 16:  "…love transforms those who love and those who are loved."  
2. 
   
   1. Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same pe