LOVE & BE LOVED - WHY: PART 1

We are so excited for our first series of 2026, “Love and Be Loved”. It is very personal to Joe and comes from a practice he tries to live out daily.

We all want to love and be loved, yet often do not know how to best do that. Life is full of choices, and it can feel overwhelming to know where to begin.

This series aims to help by offering seven big investigative questions that bring clarity to how we love and allow ourselves to be loved. These questions connect with Goal Setting Theory, which teaches that clarity, challenge, and meaningful aims help us stay committed and consistent. Our hope is that through this series we gain clarity in how to love and be loved, because clarity helps stretch and challenge us and motivates us to commit and remain consistent to what we should value most.

Week 1: We begin with the first question, Why love and be loved?, and explore how our deeper purpose fuels motivation, direction, and action.

Watch the gathering here

Readings - Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering.

What are the necessary steps in learning any art? The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice. If I want to learn the art of medicine, I must first know the facts about the human body, and about various diseases.

When I have all this theoretical knowledge, I am by no means competent in the art of medicine. I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice, until eventually the results of my theoretical knowledge and the results of my practice are blended into one, my intuition, the essence of the mastery of any art.

But, aside from learning the theory and practice, there is a third factor necessary to becoming a master in any art, the mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern; there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art. This holds true for music, for medicine, for carpentry — and for love.

And, maybe, here lies the answer to the question of why people in our culture try so rarely to learn this art, in spite of their obvious failures: in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power — almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving.