“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.” ~ Moulin Rouge
“The most important [commandment],” said Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” ~ Mark
I long viewed love, like knowledge or wisdom, a very real and concrete (although elusive) part of reality that must be accessed through certain means. There are different sorts of love, to be sure (enter Lewis’ four loves, agape, philia, eros, and storge), but I pictured these assorted loves in giant storage vats somewhere in eternity that were occasionally accessed by mankind. Love was found by… luck? Some sort of incantation to develop love toward that person that just downright annoys us? For love in the romantic sense, did it take waiting long enough with the “right attitude?”
We speak of love finding people (or people finding love), of those who seem blessed with a love for humanity. We speak of love as a thing, and by doing so, we lose its very definition as an emotion. More than am emotion, though; it is a connection between two people. Since each person is distinct, each relationship is also unique – as, I would contend, is each love. My parents’ love for one another after a quarter century together and Sarah’s long distance relationship with Peter are both examples of romantic love, but each have endured different struggles, overcome different challenges, so in some sense there is no way to compare the two. My love for my closest friends is distinct for each one, not because I love one more than another, but because the relationship has stood different tests, experienced different adventures. It’s altogether organic.
We also talk about God being love. I think love being one of God’s attributes contributed to my confusion. I pictured attributes being something immutable to the point of not being a choice; that is, God had to love us because it was part of who He is. Maybe in some sense, that is true. But it also seems clear that just as God acted by His own choice to create man, it was also His choice to love and redeem when He could, in perfect justice, destroy. And while He chose a people for Himself, that people in the plural is composed of people in the singular – individuals. Me. Me, with all my pride and imperfections – He chose to set His love upon me even though He knew everything about me.
Despite my recent ponderings on this topic, one old conclusion still rings true: there is no answer to the question why when it comes to love.
I guess the change in my understanding of love comes down to the fact that it is so particular. Invasively so. Aside from our most gross abuses of the word (I love Chinese food, I love my job), what I think we really mean by love is a connection between two people – whether agape or philia etc. – that is unique to that relationship. To put it another way, can you really love humanity? Or is that just a phrase we use to describe serving people – and is it always the same thing? I would certainly hope that service is an outward manifestation of an inward condition, but in some cases, it is not. Otherwise, it seems Jesus would have directed people differently concerning what was necessary to attain eternal life. It is not action alone, but love. When a woman of ill repute approached Jesus, washed His feet with tears and perfume and wiped them with her hair, the Pharisees distained her poor use of resources, her sinful past. Jesus commended her love.
I have long thought that love was something I had to wait to gain access to. I figured it would take divine intervention, and in some ways I guess it does. But upon recognizing how individual love is, I realized love is less about accessing some sort of mystery and is more about living. I’ve also seen how silly the idea of being in love with the idea of love is, for no real love can exist without knowing its object.
And that is a convicting reality when I consider how I approach God. So often my lack of obedience to God is a reflection of a lackluster love toward God, which is simply a result of not focusing on the Person in that most important relationship. When I am in the Word, when I pray, when my eyes are on Him, love is rekindled and obedience can be as easy as the next breath. But when it’s not… well, there is a reason loving God is the greatest command according to Jesus.
The command to love is not an impossible tasking, but it is a difficult one. Loving is difficult because it involves the heart, not just actions. It is organic, it is personal, and it is therefore very scary. Anyone old enough to be reading this and has a soul knows this to be true. Love will certainly manifest itself in good deeds, but it is more, so much more. And we're all still learning what it is to embody, demonstrate, and live out this most essential of obediences in our relationships.
So when someone figures it out, please let me know.
And now abide faith, hope, love; but the greatest of these is love. ~ 1 Corinthians 13:13
1 comment:
Isn't it interesting that we can so often miss the individual aspect of . . . well . . . EVERYTHING? So often we think in terms of the theoretical and universal, that we forget that life really revolves around the real and individual.
I have been noticing it as a theme lately . . . whether in our conversation with Emily and Michaela about marriage - and Em's recognition that "trust" is a concept that cannot be understood as a universal ideal, but that makes much more sense when applied to a particular person. . . or in my (late) realization that how Christianity addresses evil in the world (the universal sense) is secondary to my understanding of how Christ's sacrificial death and his miraculous resurrection affect evil in *me*. . . or your understanding of love at the individual level.
Sometimes I wonder if we deal in universals because the particulars leave us bare. If we are discussing universals we can hide behind theories . . . but when you bring it down to the level of the personal, you must face the question "Where do I go from here?"
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