Even though Anthony DeMello never uses the word ‘agape’ in his book, The Way to Love, because he is a Jesuit priest, in those places where he uses ‘love’ in a spiritual way that the meaning is ‘agape,’ the word was changed to ‘agape’ in the following quotes. The clear illustration for why I can make this change is shown in the following first quoted paragraph.
“God’s kingdom is agape. What does it mean to share agape? It means to be sensitive to life, to things, to persons, to feel for everything and everyone to the exclusion of nothing and no one.
“Very few people understand what agape is, and how it arises in the human heart. Agape springs from awareness.
“Agape is already there within you. All you have to do is remove the blocks you place to sensitivity and it would surface.
“What is agape? It is a sensitivity to every portion of reality within you and without, together with a wholehearted response to that reality.
“When you are tapping into agape you find yourself looking at everyone with new eyes; you become generous, forgiving, kindhearted, where before you might have been hard and mean. Inevitably people begin reacting to you in the same way and soon you find yourself living in a loving world.
“This is the first quality of agape: its indiscriminate character. That is why we are exhorted to be like God, ‘who makes his sun to shine on good and bad alike and makes his rain to fall on saints and sinners alike; so you must be all goodness as your heavenly Father is all goodness.’
“And here is the second quality of agape — its gratuitousness. It gives and asks nothing in return.
“The third quality of agape is its unselfconsciousness. Agape so enjoys the acts of sharing agape that it is blissfully unaware of itself.
“Agape simply is, it has no object.
“The final quality of agape is its freedom.
(THE ART OF LOOKING:) “Every time you find yourself irritated or angry with someone, the one to look at is not that person but yourself. The question is not, ‘What’s wrong with this person?’ but ‘What does this irritation tell me about myself?’ To understand all is to forgive all.
“The first act of having agape for another person is to see this person as the reality as he or she truly is. And this involves the enormous discipline of dropping your desires, your prejudices, your judging, your memories, your projections, your selective way of looking — to ruthlessly flash the light of awareness on your motives, your emotions, your needs, your dishonesty, your self-seeking, your tendency to control and manipulate.
“When you first experience this kind of sensitivity you are likely to experience terror. For all your defenses will be torn down, your dishonesty exposed, the protected walls around you burned.
“It is in such an act of seeing with agape that true sensitivity and awareness is born.
“If you ever allow yourself to truly see with agape, it will be the death of your false self. And so your false self will try desperately to blunt that sensitivity because its defenses are being stripped away and it is left with no protection and nothing to cling to — it is threatened unto death.
“But in the death of the false self is freedom, peace, serenity, joy — the most delightful, exhilarating experience in the whole world.
“To drop your conditioning, your prejudices and projections, your needs and attachments, your concepts and categories, and the labels you’ve learned in order to learn to see is arduous enough. But seeing calls for something more painful still. The dropping of the control that society exercises over you; a control whose tentacles have penetrated to the very roots of your being, so that to drop it is to tear yourself apart.
“If you refuse to do this you will miss out on the experience of agape, you will miss the only thing that gives meaning to human existence. For agape is the passport to abiding joy and peace and freedom.”
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