On Love

It's been a long week.   We lost a very dear loved one in the family, and it's been hard on everyone involved.  No one really knows what to do or say; there is no handbook on how to handle the passing of a young man who left behind two boys and a wife.  I will discuss this more in another post.

Thinking of life and how flimsy it is (as Dave Chappelle aptly puts it), I want to live it well.  Rent -- another fav of mine -- poses the question:  "525,600 minutes... how do you measure a year in the life of a woman or a man?" and then the cast sings, "Measure in Love."

I think that one of the problems of our culture is that it only glorifies really one aspect of Love:  romantic love. Think about it. In almost all movies there is a romantic love interest.  True Love's Kiss conquers a wicked spell.  The pursuit of romantic love has a monopoly on the content of modern media: it's integral to the plot of any "good" movie, shopping malls offer a host of material ways to attract someone into that romantic love, and our songs are riddled with that L-word; Paul McCartney just flat out admits that about his song in, "Silly Love Songs":  "some people wanna fill the world with silly love songs.  What's wrong with that, I'd like to know, cause here I go again!"  He then repeats the phrase "I love you" some thousand times.

Romantic love is great: it gives us that safe and warm feeling, but it's only one component of the full Love. C.S. Lewis in his book, The Four Loves, proposes four different facets of what we know as "love":  affection, friendship, romantic love, and unconditional love (the highest). The True Love proclaimed by the great religions of this world is much more than that expressed in a romance novel.   Gandhi, who identified himself as a Hindu and a Muslim, fasted nearly to death and would not eat anything until the violence between Muslim and Hindu sects ceased.  Martin Luther King, a Christian, conveyed the power of love in his speech, "The American Dream":

       And so throw us in jail and we will still love you. Burn our homes and threaten our children, and as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hours and beat us and drag us out on some wayside road and leave us half dead and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process. And our victory will be a double victory.

This is Love.   Can I say I've known this full spectrum of Love? Yes. However, I'm a little rusty in practicing this love.  

Valentines Day is coming up:  that day that can be hard on singles sometimes; that day which perpetuates the myth that a happy life hinges on romantic love, just one part of true Love; that day which spurs the urgent race to "find someone," that we may not waste away this life... alone! *gasp!*

But what about real Love?  What must we do to experience that full, joy-filled Love that God gives to us?

The Bible states it clearly in I Corinthians 13: [The Message] If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy, but don't Love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.  If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump" and it jumps, but I don't Love, I'm nothing.  If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't Love, I've gotten nowhere.  So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without Love.

How do I Love?  Thankfully, the Bible goes on to list clearly the qualities that comprise True Love in I Corinthians: Love is patient, Love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Starting today, there are 14 days before Valentine's Day.  There are 14 tenets to this statement.  I am going to take these 14 days and focus on one piece a day.  I need to get my head on straight about love and stop worrying about myself all the time.  I will try to write each day with what I've (hopefully!) learned.