Hard Blessings: Doing The Work Of Love

Who would dare to write about love! An excess of syrup and pap has been penned on the subject. Some have prudently suggested that we establish a moratorium for at least a year on a word that has lost its finest meaning for us. While love is our most prostituted concept, there remains our most potent reality. Love may not make the world go around as the Romantics coined (alas, greed is closer to doing that), love does, as one sage muses, make the ride worthwhile. The following essays aspired to evoke the range of dimensions that comprise love at its hardest: trust, guilt, forgiveness, compromise, weeping, anger, loneliness and the like. In exploring tough lessons of love one must prove serious without turning grim, blithesome without sounding farcical, tender without becoming maudlin. Surely love, at its fullest, delivers difficult yet welcome gifts!