Fundamentals: Love Part II

Surely my understanding of love is influenced by my having been raised in a relatively stable household in a time of great prosperity».  I can’t help it: God’s love means something to me that it doesn’t mean to a 12^th century Spanish mystic or a Bronze Age patriarch stumbling out of Ur.  And their sense of love is alien to me, too.  I realize that there are people in this profoundly privileged epoch who don’t see it that way.  In fact, I knew a woman who was reticent to even tell her own children she loved them, lest they grow accustomed to it and take it for granted.  God, for her, felt the same.  God’s love is not ubiquitous; it must be curried like a Dark Age feudal lord’s favor.  Go figure.  Relative to both my past and my reflection, I think that the ubiquity of God’s love forces people to take it for granted.

I cannot help seeing the universe through the lens of love.  When St. John says, “God is love”, he isn’t looking at that God and that love through my privileged twenty first century eyes.  He never read a Hallmark card and didn’t have any memories of those little naked doe-eyed people from the seventies saying things like, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”à He didn’t love chocolate cake, had never made love to a woman·. 

In love making there is a disruption of everything, a disordering and chaotic grinding together.  In the aftermath there is at least the possibility of new arising from the ashes of the old.  Cells collide, combine and divide, splitting and joining. 

            That kind of love, shredding division and clanging union, is powerful. 

            Love is fundamental and paradoxical.  Life is brutish and short.  All organisms are genetically selfish.  That is to say, they do not share useful adaptations with just everyone.  They only pass those along to their offspring.  So a dolphin, for example, isn’t going to give you the genes necessary to hold your breath for a long time.  That wasn’t always the case.  There was a time, scientists speculate, when simple single celled organisms had porous walls and were able to give and take genetic code from one another.  So if you as a cell had some beneficial adaptation, you could give it to me. 

            Clearly those cells don’t behave that way because they’re kind or altruistic, but in a sense love is a mindless giving.  Love is promiscuous.  It doesn’t care who it touches and rubs up against.  It gives to its last breath.  Jesus said that God showers the just and the unjust.

            When I was a gardener, I watered my garden.  I carefully set up the sprinklers to hit only my plants, with a minimum of overspray.  That way I wasn’t wasting water.  Love, on the other hand, is naturally wasteful.  It falls not only on my deserving garden, but on the lawn, the weeds, the trees, the roof, the sidewalk, the street: everywhere in wasteful abundance.

The good news of Jesus is about love.  When Jesus was asked the key to the Law and the Prophets, he said, like any good rabbi, that the commandment to love God with one’s totality is where it’s at.  Actually, the Hebrew tradition in which Jesus was so steeped was too visceral, too bodily, too bloody for as soft a summary as that. 

Hear, O Israel, the LORD your God, the LORD is one.

You shall love the LORD with all your heart,

with all your soul

with all your mind

and with all your strength¥.

Then, just like any good rabbi, and in keeping with the scriptures of his people, Jesus couldn’t resist adding a second bit to the question of which Law summarized them all.

You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself.

Then he told the story of the Samaritan, the dying man, and the innkeeper, to show that neighbors are not just those people who look, think, speak, smell, spend, believe, worship, eat, make love, and keep house like we do or would like to do.  Neighbors can be enemies, as Jesus reminded his hearers in another place.µ 

            At the risk of sounding like those tough guys who have in recent years  taken the men’s movement of the ‘80’s and early ‘90’s and recycled it into a Christian manhood movement with a macho Christ who can hunt, throw a football, and open bottles of light beer bottles with his wedding ring, love is tough.  It’s strong and abrasive and natural.

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» Not that we saw much of that prosperity.  The 1970’s aren’t remembered as times of enormous wealth for Americans.   My family was no different.  Even before Reganomics trickled down and made us fabulously lower middle class we didn’t have much.  But every day of my childhood I ate, lived under a roof, had access to clean water.  We even had toys and a television.  Compared to the rest of the world, and most of history, we lived like kings.    

à Which is, in my thinking, both profound and a tremendous load of crap all at once.  One of the ways I express love is in apology.    On the other hand, I would hope that I could be gracious enough to forgive before I’m asked to do so.

· I assume, based on his time, not his virginity or studliness.  Maybe first century people “made love”, but I’ve never heard it referred to that way.

¥ Look at The Story of Heaven.

µ There are plenty of resources available to tell you how many times Jesus talked about various things, most usually noted are money, love, hell, and homosexuality.  Suffice it to say that Jesus talked a lot about love.