I talk a lot about love – trepidly, for the word feels overworn, too convenient, a cliché: the invariable missing ingredient – add love and all will be OK. Many believe in love’s power, but those who discuss it are derided as pollyannish, clueless. Love is for pulpits and therapists’ couches, not for the hurly-burly of the so-called “real world.”

I say what I feel; I also try not to seem a sap. I check out how my predecessors have tackled the topic. Most thinkers worth their salt conclude, with Emily Dickinson,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThat love is all there is,Is all we know of love.

Inject love into the management of human affairs and, presto terrifico, all our vileness would vanish, for as Jung observed, “Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking.” In our private lives we share Victor Hugo’s enthusiasm, “What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!”

We may believe these things fervently. But exit your home onto the street and suddenly love takes a second seat to convenience, practicality, self-defense. How can we be expected to love when everyone else is acting hatefully? Try loving a trooper on patrol and you might get shot! Fight fire with fire! Vanquish our foes, then let love mop up after!

Love’s easy to preach, hard to perform. Even the nubile, who want nothing more, may make a mess of it. As a swain I had two left feet; the spirit was willing, but I kept screwing up. That I finally persuaded Jane is attributable as much to her patience as my persistence.

How to make love an active ingredient in one’s activity and not just a nice-to-have one sighs for? How to do it, not just say it?

Here’s my hunch: Teach it – to yourself – non-stop. Every day plug yourself into Love and recharge. Measure your choices by Love’s stern rule. Do better, more. It’s work, Love, its dictates not always obvious. Few loved mankind more passionately than the pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, yet he plotted to assassinate Hitler – from love, he’d have insisted, if he’d lived to defend his choice. Love must discriminate – whom do I assist? Whom neglect while assisting another? “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend,” wrote mild E. M. Forster, “I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

Lift love off the shelf and drub it into yourself. Treat it as you might your favorite sport. A serious tennis player has never “learned” tennis, they’re always learning; at their best, still far from their goal. So love, more than a prayer, is a skillset to be refined, revised, practiced. In my tennis years, my backhand never satisfied but I kept at it. So with love.

Put it another way, let’s use that new verb and weaponize love. Until I was sixty, nobody weaponized anything except weaponry, but now we’re weaponizing everything – law, outrage, victimhood, you name it. If our enemies do it with grievance, let us do it with grace. Love does not sigh from the sidelines, but acts – as Bonhoeffer acted, murderously perhaps, if the violence stems from Love.

I never used to think much about love – no namby-pamby I! Now it’s my exhilarating adventure. The escalating evil in our world has kindled its opposition. I ride Love like a toboggan I can scarcely steer. “Think not you can direct the course of love,” wrote Kahil Gibran; “for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.”