What Does Love Look Like Across Cultures?

Journeys have been on my mind a lot lately. Over the last few years, my daughter and son have enabled me to travel across two different oceans, taking me to places that are my roots.

But I have been thinking not just about these literal trips. This year, what’s been on my mind is the inner journey I have been exploring—with my writing and my spiritual paths. Traveling these roads has taken a lifetime, and I view them as continuous journeys toward peace, faith, belonging, and the ultimate Love that is God.

My own journey has taken some unexpected routes.

I grew up exposed to different worlds—a girl from England with an accent nobody in Pensacola quite understood, the daughter of a Filipino father who crossed an ocean because of a nursery rhyme about London Bridge, and an English mother who became Catholic as a wartime evacuee and never looked back. When I got married, I was immersed in yet another world: an Iranian family whose generosity and warmth humbled me daily. My sister-in-law Goltala—whose name means “flower of God”—rose before sunrise every Saturday to bake bread for our family. She came to Mass every Sunday because she wanted to go to “God’s house.” All these cultures have shaped me as I travel the map of my life.

I discovered over my years of writing and in the communities I have belonged to—poetry groups, my Catholic parish, the Catholic Writers Guild—that the deepest experiences of hope and love are found in people of every culture. What I write is informed by living in worlds from East to West and in between.

Not from any one culture, one tradition, one zip code.

Many.

Those learning experiences surface everywhere. In Goltala’s bread dough. In my grandfather’s rhyming letters from England. In my young child, pointing at the light through a smoky barbecue chimney and whispering, “Look, Mama, it’s God.”

That is what my books in the Everywhere… series are trying to do—honor cultural differences, not just of place, but of beliefs, and show how love travels like a highway that passes through many landscapes before reaching home.

Everywhere Hope, my first book, began with a poem I wrote when I was eight years old. It grew into a collection of personal essays, poetry, and Scripture—a cross-cultural spiritual journey that our beloved retired Bishop of St. Augustine once described as “a genius of feminine perception embedded in an unusual multicultural integration.” I am still amazed (but not surprised because he is so kind) at those words he wrote.

Now, Everywhere Love is nearly complete. It follows the same road but deeper, into the nature of love itself: how we first receive it, how we give it, how we lose and rebuild it, and how, if we are paying attention, we begin to recognize God’s Divine Hand in ordinary and not-so-ordinary moments.

As all of my fellow CWG community members do, I write from a Catholic faith perspective, but I have always believed that love and the longing for God are not limited to any one tradition. I believe St. Augustine’s famous quote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You,” speaks to every human being. My highway to Love has been traveled by many people of varied faiths and backgrounds, and each of them has taught me something along the way. What does love look like across cultures? In my view, it’s the same: “God is love…”—1 John 4:8

If you are on a journey of your own—whether it feels like I-10 smooth and boring, or a pothole-riddled detour like those I found in the Philippines—I hope something in the pages of my new book meets you where you are.

Edited by Gabriella Batel

Photo Credit:barneyelo/Pixabay