“All you need is love. All you need is love. All you need is love, love. Love is all you need.”
The lyrics to the Beatles’ famous song play like a soundtrack in my mind. A classic. It’s a catchy feel good song. Each beat like an anthem declaring itself to my heart. 
Everywhere I turn lately, it’s all I hear. Love is the answer to everything. We are love warriors and we have hashtags stating #loveisloveislove, Madonna even chanting it at the end of her speech at a recent women’s march. “We choose LOVE! We choose Love! We choose Love!!!!” She screams this into the very same microphone that only moments before amplified her thoughts of blowing up the White House.
And I wonder….Is this really all we need? Is this the love we need? If we just chant the word enough, or if we scream it loudly from a microphone, or maybe if we hashtag it to death, will something change then? Will the word love be enough to heal our our broken hearts? our communities? our country?
It seems as though love has taken on a loftiness about it as of late. Tenuous in nature, it is sweeping across our nation making unsubstantiated claims. It has become an abstract, vaporous idea that invites people to adhere their own personal definitions to it. Suddenly, love can be whatever you’d like it to be. And while this idea presents itself as being inclusive and freeing, I believe it does us a disservice. How can we all claim that love is the answer when our definition of love is so vastly different from one another?
