I talk about love a lot. I believe it’s my job. When you talk about love as often as I do, people either change the subject, or they have questions. The most frequent question is, “What do you even mean by love?” And I think it makes sense to ask that. After all, if I’m going to insist that God is Love, and that God’s commandment is that we love one another, then I’d better be clear on just what I believe we’re being commanded to do.
Are we being asked to do something impossible? Are we expected to feel a certain way about all people? Are we supposed to have warm fuzzy thoughts about people who harm us? Are we supposed to just gloss over the real problems we have and say, “Well love wins”?
Love can be a feeling. But on a day-to-day basis we cannot control our feelings, so the command to love, when it doesn’t seem frivolous and unrealistic, can often feel idealistic and unattainable. My old friend Norm used to tell me all the time that love is a verb – and that if we have any interest in talking about God and love, then we should be talking about action, not feeling.
I almost entirely agree with him. How we verb love is incredibly important. I can feel like getting healthier all the time, but if I don’t eat conscientiously, cut down on the whiskey and cigars, and go to the gym regularly, my feelings don’t matter. I can feel sorry for the man on the side of the road – my feelings will not get him a bed to sleep in. When St. James said faith without works is dead, this is basically what he meant: My feelings and beliefs about love are toothless unless I understand the verbness of love.
There is also something to be said for love as a noun – which is to say love is something and someone real. Love exists as something with which with whom we interact. I can too easily treat love as a benign concept, or worse, an ideal. Ideals are sort of terrible. They sit up there in the ether, gorgeous and untouchable. Love as a concept or ideal is benign at best. Love as a noun has substance and agency and power and consequences.
Consequences. The decision to love is the decision to attach myself to the power of God, the power that creates galaxies, softens hearts, and foments eternal life. How could that be benign?
So, love is a verb and a noun and sometimes a feeling, and love is the commandment given to us by the God who is love. Neil Young once sang, “love’s the question, love’s the answer.” Which is beautiful and true and also how the hell does it help me?
I want to talk about love in real time, in real life. I want to articulate a practical application of love. With that in mind how about this: Love is a lens through which we look at the world, at our lives, at our selves. In the Christian tradition it is said that God made the world, and that God made humans in God’s image. In practical terms then, to look through the lens of love is to try to find God’s presence in everyone I meet, in every situation in which I find myself – and then to honor that presence with my words and deeds.
This is practical work. Because participating in the love for which we were made takes work even if we were made for it. And we need to say that out loud because when we don’t we get caught up in romantic notions of love as something that comes easy. Then when love becomes difficult, we misidentify and abandon it. “What good is it to love only the people who love you?” Jesus was known to ask, and this is what he was getting at. “Oh, you see God’s presence in people who like you and make your life easier? How nice! Are you interested in something deeper?”
When Jesus reaffirms the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself, he is speaking pragmatically, not idealistically. He is not prescribing a standard to which we should aspire: He is describing the lens through which we can look at everyday life. “Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you,” is not lofty abstract talk: It is the foundation for our participation in eternal life here and now.
I am thinking now about people who don’t like me. This is not theoretical: I know them and know why they don’t like me. That’s ok. That’s their right. How can I love them? Can I send them flowers and try to get them to like me again? Not likely. In some cases, I have tried that, and it did not work. Do I need to subject myself time and again to their dislike? Do I need to pretend I have happy feelings for them in order to follow the commandment to love?
No. I cannot make myself feel anything. And I cannot make others feel anything either. That’s a whole other podcast/blog – but let me say in short, we cannot make others feel or believe anything, and loving people is not about trying to fix them or change their minds. Robert Frost got it write when he wrote that “we love the things we love for what they are.”
On a practical level, I can love someone who hates me by refusing to hate them, by refusing to dehumanize them in my thoughts, words, and deeds. I can love them by even considering the reasons they don’t like me – even if I don’t agree with them, even if I think I am right. I can love them by insisting that they are made in God’s image, that God is present within them, that they are as complicated and messy as I am. I can love them by praying for them – and not some nonsense prayer where I pray for God to change their minds – I can pray that they experience love themselves, that God bless them.
Nothing theoretical or lofty about this, nothing self-righteous. We can seek daily to love people we don’t like, who don’t like us. We can refuse to give into our own temptation to hate them. You are completely capable of loving your enemies. In fact, God has made you to love like this. It’s why you are here.
I am going to keep writing about this because there seem to be so many practical objections to God’s command to love, and I want to talk about them. We have so many reasons not to do it, not to accept it, not to believe in it. But I am convinced more than ever that God has made us for love, whether we get it or not. I’m convinced that learning to get it is why we are here.
