Love Is Bigger Than Us

You know, the way we talk about love these days feels so small to me. We tie it to individuals, to romance, to fleeting moments between two people—a man and a woman, or any two partners. But love isn’t about that. It can’t be. It’s about something so much larger, so much more enduring. It’s about the faith we hold in humanity. When you think about it, isn’t that what all love is, at its core? A belief in people, in the fact that we are capable of kindness, of honesty, of beauty, even when the evidence doesn’t always seem to be in our favor?

What is it that draws us to another person in the first place? Sure, appearance, shared interests, humor—those are easy answers. But it’s deeper than that. I think we love people because they reflect pieces of humanity back to us and remind us of what might be possible. When someone holds us close or tells us we matter, they aren’t just saying something personal—it’s universal. The connection we feel is a reflection of what makes us human. And when we strip away the superficial, every gesture of love we share with one person is just an echo of the love we long to feel for the world. Isn’t that why it feels so profound?

“God is love.” It’s such a simple statement, isn’t it? But I always come back to it. In the Bible, it doesn’t just mean that God has love—it means God is love itself. A force, an essence, present in everything. That force isn’t limited to romantic partnerships. It radiates through every act of kindness, every cry for justice, every moment we choose dignity over division. When we truly "love our neighbors as ourselves," isn’t that an act of such radical, impossible faith in humanity that it borders on divine?

Rumi tackles this idea so beautifully. He says, “When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense.” What he’s getting at is something almost overwhelming to think about—oneness. Love, the truest kind, cannot exist in isolation. It isn’t narrowly exchanged between two people in private spaces. It spreads, overflowing from one heart to another, weaving a fabric of connection that holds the entire universe together.

I saw this once, on a seemingly ordinary day. I was rushing through the city—head down, lost in my own life—when a woman tripped on the edge of the sidewalk and fell. What should have been an embarrassing or frustrating moment turned into something else entirely. Strangers stopped, reached down, asked if she was okay, offered their hands. There was no romance, no obligation. Just human beings choosing to help. That tiny scene has stayed in my mind because it felt like watching love in action. Pure and basic, stripped of pretense. No one exchanged details. No one took credit. But wasn’t that reminder of love—agape, as the Greeks called it—a testament to our faith in each other?

And yet, it’s not always easy to feel that way, is it? Sometimes it’s hard to believe in humanity's goodness when the world feels so broken. Wars. Exploitation. Cruelty spread like wildfire on today’s newsfeeds. Hannah Arendt once spoke of the “banality of evil,” the idea that ordinary people go along with terrible things because it's easier than choosing to resist. But I don’t think we talk enough about the banality of love. Those countless, unnoticed moments of care and empathy that often go unseen, but which hold humanity together like invisible threads.

Look at Dostoevsky. He believed in redemption through suffering, in the beauty of the broken and flawed. “Love all of God’s creation,” he said, “every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things.” It’s not just people who demand our love—everything does. The hairline cracks in someone’s eyes when they’re barely holding it together. The stray dog looking for food. The stranger sitting silently alone on a park bench. Isn’t all of it calling to us?

Sometimes the love we owe humanity is deeply uncomfortable. It asks us to forgive those who harm us, to extend grace when we’d rather point fingers. Gandhi’s philosophy of ahimsa understood this so well. He fought for freedom not by fostering anger but by trying to wake up the slumbering humanity in his oppressors. Martin Luther King Jr. followed the same path. “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that,” he said. We all know those words, but when I really let them land, I feel their weight. Hatred divides and isolates us. Love, even in its most painful form, pulls us back together.

And this isn’t just found in religion or philosophy. Literature has always told us these things in ways we can’t ignore. When Victor Hugo wrote, “To love another person is to see the face of God,” wasn’t he saying, in his own way, that love transcends mere interpersonal romance? It’s a spiritual affirmation that loving anyone, in any capacity, is a declaration of belief. Belief that they matter. Belief that we matter.

But belief is scary because it means hope. It means vulnerability. It means letting go of our cynicism, even when the world gives us every reason to hold onto it. Victor Frankl, imprisoned in the Nazi death camps, said, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” And isn’t that the key to loving humanity? To see our collective flaws, to feel the heartbreak, and to choose love over despair anyway?

At its best, love for humanity transforms us. It forces us to expand, to widen the boundaries of who and what we care about. When I see someone shelter a homeless person under their umbrella in the rain, when an activist speaks up for justice despite all odds, when a child shares their tiny sandwich with a friend, I’m reminded—this is what love looks like in the wild. It’s not perfect. It’s raw and real and often full of doubt. But it’s there.

I remind myself of this every day: love—real love—can’t be contained in the narrow confines of one person or one relationship. It’s what connects us to the sacred. It’s what makes us human. It’s flawed and messy and so impossibly big. But it’s the only thing that can save us.

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