In which she discloses thoughts on love before the week of Valentine’s Day

“When you get in love you are made all over again. The person who loves you has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum of uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person who, however, has also created you. So there are two yous, one you yourself create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. If you loved and were loved perfectly, then there wouldn’t be any difference between the two yous or any distance between them.” ~ Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

We were supposed to learn this lesson as children from the story of the Velveteen Rabbit. Love makes you real, right? So we either spend our lives trying to find love (romantics) or running away from it (self-described realists). In both cases, love is the great motivator. One fears a life without love; the other fears any stain of emotion that could impact their otherwise immaculate judgment.

This fact evidences how our humanity has clouded our understanding when it comes to love. Most of our love stories are flawed because they are based on human love, and life experience screams of the shortcomings of human love daily. A sappy romantic comedy is no match for the evening news. A man throws his four young children off a bridge to their deaths. Another kills a fellow Marine and her unborn baby, burns their remains, and buries them in his backyard. Divorce. Breakups. Loveless marriages that are far worse than either. Rational people recognize the shortcomings of human love. With love from one to another based on nothing but ourselves, there are no guarantees.

Warren is onto something here – something far more than I think he understood. We know the root of sin is pride. But what came before that first pride in the Garden were seeds of doubt planted in Eve’s heart by the Snake. By questioning God’s character and love for His creation – a tactic still being used today (how many times have you heard someone ask, “if God really loved me, why doesn’t He…”) – humanity began fancying itself something far different than God had fashioned us to be. To borrow Warren’s language, a gap was created between the beloved’s understanding of herself (our self-perception) and the reality (who God actually created us to be). Quite naturally, the “poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into.” But when we try to answer this most burning question, we invest more time looking at ourselves instead of the One who is loving us. Doesn’t that miss the point of a relationship entirely?

No wonder half of us go from identity crisis to identity crisis while the other half labor to create an identity of their own making in which to find refuge. We fail to grasp the perfect love that vivifies us.

“For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height – to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.” ~ Ephesians 3:14-21