The Liberating Power of Agapé

During these last 150 years of reviving the use of ‘agapé’ as a spiritual term, most people had a hard time accepting it as a word to use because it was considered to be arcane and unusual. But as I looked back into the use of the word by the first Christians, I discovered that it was not a commonly used word at that time either.

So for most Greeks in the 1st Century, when agapé was introduced into spiritual practices, it would have seemed arcane and unusual then. There is no evidence of it being used among average Greeks until St. Paul started using it. His use of it in the 1st Century began in a similar way as it did in the 19th Century: as a spiritual term. It was not used in common Greek language as a word for “love,” but appeared exclusively in religious writings. And that’s how it was used in translating the Gospels.

When I first started studying the way ‘agapé’ was used by St. Paul, I began to see how he used it to express the liberating aspect of spiritual energy. He claimed that agapé was a spiritual power to liberate people from the pressures of their era -- to prepare them for the New Age that was dawning.

He pointed out how the spiritual energy of agapé can keep us from being conformed to the selfish, egotistical, violent pattern of the era he believed was ending. I think his ideas can be useful today because of the overwhelming evidence of what the last 200 years have shown about the selfish, egotistical, violent pattern of our era of history.  

Of course, the liberation of our minds is not easy, because the tremendous pressures from the human world are very difficult to overcome. The forces of this long era of history have been building up for the hundreds of years of the process that has been named ‘civilization.’ (Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “The end of the human race will be that we will eventually die of civilization.” That slow death is what we have to overcome.)

St. Paul considered this spiritual energy to have a transformative quality that should work in a person’s life to help her or him not be conceited or proud, but live kindly in harmony and peace with everyone, even to the point of blessing those who persecute you.

To drive home the difficulty of letting the spiritual energy of agapé be transformative in our living, he ended by talking about not repaying evil for evil, and not taking revenge. But if people resist and are not willing to make the huge effort involved with living by agapé, then their minds stay enslaved to the old pattern of the selfish, egotistical, violent present era of history. 

In the same way as in the 1st Century, we today have to decide to let our minds be liberated from the old, destructive pattern of this era in order to take part in the new way of living. Only spiritual energy is powerful enough to bring about such liberation.

“Agapé” in the Great Shema

Many years ago I started wondering why an ancient Greek word started being used again after not being used for hundreds of years. That word is “agapé.” 

In the 1920’s a Swedish pastor wrote a book about "agapé" in the New Testament. Slowly Christians started using it as people realized that the word “charity” was actually a translation of it. But I wondered how “charity” could be a translation of “agapé.” It turns out that “caritas” is the Latin translation.

Clergy started quoting from the Swedish book in their sermons. I heard the quotes from as widespread a list of preachers as Billy Graham and Rev. Martin Luther King. Then after World War II, agapé started being used in the names of churches and youth choirs. 

At first I couldn’t trace back its origin any farther than to find out it was very important to the first Christians. But what did they think it meant? I finally realized a mistake had been made in the 19th Century. For some strange reason, Bible translators started translating it as “love,” even though it was very clear that whatever the first Christians thought it meant, it didn’t mean love. 

So where did the first Christians get the word? Well, after years of searching, I found it in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures (made by 70 scholars in Egypt a century before Jesus). It was in the most famous passage in Deuteronomy — called the “Great Shema” (because ‘Shema’ is the ancient word, which is — as usual — weakly translated in English as ‘hear’ or ‘listen,’ even though that is far too calm a word for its full meaning). 

You see ‘Shema’ is a Call word: commanding a spiritual experience of the faith community. It is used like blowing the shofar horn: gathering the whole people into a worshipping experience. When those 70 scholars started translating the Great Shema they would have known that it was very important what word they chose to express the way of answering the call to bring each worshiper’s whole being (“all your heart, all your mind, and all your strength”) into a profound experience of divine Presence. 

But they probably realized that no commonly used Greek word carried that full meaning of spiritual power. And that spiritual-experience word they chose was ‘agapé.’ That then becomes the key to the meaning of agapé. Then when the 70 scholars translated Leviticus, they made the profound leap to have that spiritual experience be the basis for what forms the community of the faithful people — the call is extended to “your neighbor as yourself;” thus making the spiritual meaning of agapé the basis for forming a community in worship. Then in the Gospels we have Jesus make the final huge, radical, profound leap to call for that spiritual experience extended to enemies. 

And so the Greek version of the Gospels used ‘agapé.’ I saw that was the reason St. Paul used the word ‘agapé’ to point to the power of spiritual experience.

Engulfed in Agapé

As I was looking out of the window of our new home, I enjoyed seeing our new neighborhood covered in 6 inches of snow from a late Spring storm. Even though the view was beautiful, I have to admit that I started wondering what it would look like when warm Spring weather finally melted the snow and the branches sprouted with leaves.

Then I remembered a late April blog posting I’d made 9 years before. It had developed from a meditation time outdoors in a park near where we’d been living for over 11 years. I remembered that while I meditated, I experienced the radiating Life force of Spring. Then as I went deeper, I had the spiritual sensation of being engulfed in agapé. The memory was so strong, that I looked up that blog posting to read how I expressed it. 

The experience had been so powerful that there was no distinction between agapé filling me from within and agapé surrounding me from outside. In that sense, there was no “within” and no “outside.” The engulfing was complete, and I was joyfully enlivened by the spiritual sensation of being opened to divine Presence.

At the time I’d been reading Ram Dass’ Be Love Now. So after I returned home and was attempting to write about it in a blog posting, I reflected on the one time when Ram Dass admitted that the spiritual experiences he’d been writing about were what the ancient Greeks called “agapé.” He explained the process of sharing in the flow of agapé with these words: 

"If you put out agape, then you immerse yourself in the sea of agape.”

Since that time, the influence of agapé has developed more strongly throughout my life. Agapé consciousness has formed for me in such a way that I have found that it changed the way I developed identity. My identity in life reformed with the vast, formless, eternal Essence. That has helped me release being controlled by any ego-identity. So that has helped me see other people from the viewpoint of the vast, formless, eternal Essence.

Agapé consciousness can develop for all people as we are able to move away from ego-identity and experience our identity with eternal Essence. We can be helped also in our relationships with Life around us, with the expressions of Life in the people and creatures with whom we come into contact. As agapé consciousness develops, we are able to learn an increasingly deeper appreciation for people, other creatures, and all of Creation.

And that learning involves a profound acceptance of eternal, spiritual Presence permeating all the entities within relational fields. Agapé also spreads spiritually throughout all the relationships of life, deepening that relating. Also all relationships are sensed as connected through spiritual Presence.