Rector's Blog: Got To Get You Into My Life

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When I was 14 years old I fell in love with The Beatles. I was in a booth at Islands Restaurant on Tustin Avenue in Orange, California eating cheese fries with my mom when this song came on that I’d never heard before and I instantly knew it was perfect. I pointed upward and asked my mom, “What is this?”

“The music?” I said yeah and she said, well it’s the Beatles.

I wasn’t a complete stranger to them. I had heard some of their greatest hits of course, and like any child of the 80’s, I had seen Ferris Bueller’s Day off and knew their legendary cover of “Twist and Shout”. But this was something else. And I knew instantly that I wanted more. I went home and broke into my older brother’s box of CDs, I mean that literally, by the way: He had a locked chest where he was storing his CDs and I pried it open, and put on the first Beatles album I could find. It was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and I was hooked.

Maybe it wasn’t the Beatles for you, but have you ever just loved something or someone immediately? I remember knowing about my wife, knowing I would fall in love with her, knowing I’d want to marry her, long before it made any sense, and long before I wanted to admit it. But at 14 it was the Beatles. I did a deep dive. I wanted to know everything I could about them.

Early in their career the Beatles covered an old pop song called, “To Know Him is to Love Him,” by The Teddy Bears. They sang it as “To Know Her is to Love Her.” This song, which is not one of their hits, (it’s not the song I heard on the radio in the restaurant, by the way,) and is not an objectively great song – it has been rattling around in my head for 30 years. The sentiment is what has stuck with me: To know them is to love them. The suggestion being that, hey, how could you not love this person? I remember recently witnessing a friend of mine being painfully misunderstood, and I remember thinking if only the people who misunderstood her really knew her, they would love her too. How could they not?

It's interesting though, this idea that loving someone is meant as a compliment. Love as seal of approval. As if the love we give someone is a sign that they are worth loving, that they have earned it, that their character has somehow merited our love. Even though that’s almost never been our experience of love. People may earn our trust. People may earn our respect, our esteem, our appreciation. But our love works differently and we know it. It wasn’t my trust the Beatles won over that day in the booth of that vaguely Hawaiian-themed restaurant.

The phrase is to know them is to love them. But I think I’ve begun to believe the opposite. I think I believe now that to love someone is to know them.

It is the Christian belief that God is love. Not that God is loving, or that God loves some people, or that God has some fondness for you – though it’s totally possible that God is deeply fond of you. The Christian statement is that God is Love. And that the God who is love created all things. Which means all things are made out of love, by love, in love. That love is the foundational truth of all that exists. Our Scriptures say that humans were made in the image of God, and that means that you and I are made in the image of Love.

If this is true, then I cannot really know you until I love you. Knowledge is not what makes me love. Love is what inspires knowledge. Love is the lens through which I must look at you if I have any desire at all to really know you. How can I say I know someone if I do not love them? If I do not love you, I am not seeing you through God’s eyes, and I am not seeing God’s image in you. And if that’s the case, I don’t really know you. Not the real you.

But if I love you, if I see you through loving eyes, I have a chance of actually knowing you.

I fell in love with my wife before I really knew her. Somehow I was just ready to love her, and I don’t think there’s a good explanation for it. But that love compelled me to learn more, to go deeper, to pay attention differently. To love her was to know her. To love someone is to be drawn more deeply into a desire to know and understand them. To love them is to want to move past their greatest hits and get to the deep cuts of their life, the less obvious pieces of them that shape their lives and your experience of them.

I study and practice Christianity for a living. And when I engage others in that work, one thing that comes up a lot is people’s frustration with God. Specifically, they find God hard to understand. For the record, so do I. Sometimes, though, people simply give up on trying to love God because they don’t understand God. How am I supposed to love a God that I don’t understand? How am I supposed to be faithful to a God that doesn’t always make sense to me? I have been asked this question in various ways throughout my ministry. At first I struggled with it deeply. And then I realized: The people we love the most, we don’t understand them. They never cease to be mysterious to us even when we can predict so much of what they will do.

I have been married for 15 years. I know my wife quite well, and likewise she knows me. We love each other and we know each other and we do not[RC1] always understand each other. My children? They are my joy, and they confuse me endlessly.

I am curious what happens to your faith if you let go for a minute of your need to understand God, and simply focus on loving and being loved. You may never understand God, but you very well may get to know them. Deeply. More deeply than you can imagine. To love is to know.