...on to love

It has been a while since my last confession...

I have avoided this topic for quite some time now, feeling unqualified to write anything down on it. For me this is the most important topic, at the heart of the gospel, at the heart of human-human relationships and divine-human relationships. It is the topic at the heart of life. My plan is to just start writing, and refine the thoughts in successive passes and posts. Hopefully things will come to a point of clarity. In many ways the previous posts were a prolegomena to this, since all I am posting is words.

First up, a tentative definition:

LOVE:
noun. A spiritual sense by which we can perceive reality in a way that approximates God's perception.
verb. The act of sensing reality through God's eyes.

I have thought for some years now on the definition of love. From 'feeling' to 'verb' to 'regard for the other' to 'will that seeks flourishing of life'. From looking at loves expressions to its effects. I am coming to the thought that love is a sense for several reasons:

(1) Some years ago I heard tony Campolo speak of love as seeing through someone's eyes into their heart, and their heart reaching right back through to your own and gripping it. I found this to be a profound insight. To run with this idea we might imagine that, despite looking at many people each day as we walk past them in the street, there are times in our lives when we look at a person and find something in them that compels us to love them. What we think is our love for them is actually our response to what we see. But to identify love as the response it to have something that is mechanistic - simply present the goods before our eyes and we cannot help but love. In reality there is more to it than that.

Take for example the person we once loved but now cannot for some reason. Usually in these cases something happened that hurt us, or made us see something 'ugly', 'unlovely' in that person, something that we couldn't 'overlook'. Why is it that we look upon a drug addict, for example, or an adulterer, and we see a person who we cannot trust, a person with whom something is wrong and who we should maintain a certain 'safe' distance from? At the same time we look upon a cute little baby and can be filled with affection? Is this another mechanistic reaction, like instinct? Or is there more to it? I think the key to this scenario is the word forgiveness. A baby is often a helpless person, totally dependent, quite innocent, vulnerable, non-dangerous, a fresh 'heart' craving our love and compelling us to respond in love. It is easy for us to perceive a baby through the eyes of love. But drug addicts, adulterers, violent or aggressive people, even depressed people we find that we hold something against them, something that prevents us from loving them. Only when we can truly forgive them do we find that we can see them again through the 'eyes' of love. Only then can we deem them as 'worthy' to receive our love (again taking love as the response for the moment).

So, if love can be hindered by unforgiveness (and transgression before that), and if in the absence of those things (as well as the absence of our own fear and insecurities) we can freely look upon others with loving eyes, then love might not be the response at all, but the very act of perceiving that which illicits the various 'loving' responses.

(2) People often think they love a person soon after they have met them, but after they get to know them more they find that the person they loved was a figment of their imagination. To truly love a person you have to know that person truly (warts and all). This requires (a) that they reveal their true selves, and (b) that we are able to perceive and appreciate what is revealed. Thus the saying 'to know you is to love you', has a bit of truth in it. On the flip side of this coin, it is often only when we spend some time to get to know the real person that we find the fears and apprehensions we once had are not justified, and we often come to find a new respect for people who we might have dismissed on first impression. Love delights in the truth.

(3) I have never been convinced by the statement 'love is a verb, defined by its actions'. 1 Corinthians 13 speaks of many actions that a person can do for another, but they can all be done without love and thus amount to nothing. For the Apostle Paul as he writes to his church, the only thing that is important is the love itself. If you have love then the actions will flow, but to manufacture loving actions without having the actual love, this misses the point and creates artificial fruit without a tree. Therefore love must be something other than its expressions, it must be a source, a fountain. And yet what is the source, the point from which all flows?

(4) If love is the perceiving of something lovable in another person (or object?) then what governs this? Why don't we love everyone? Why don't we see something in everyone that compels us to love in the same way we look at so few people and are compelled to love them? What is the difference between one person and another, or is the difference inside us? In so many ways the things that stop us looking through the lens of love can be traced back to (a) unforgiveness, (b) fear and (c) selfishness.

(5) There are definitions of love that centre around the response we have when we perceive something loving, and definitions that approach love by love's goal, but this troubles me because if love's goal is to seek and act towards the good (or 'flourishing') of the beloved, then what exactly is that 'good'? In what way can love determine what course of action will result in good or flourishing, since we have such limited knowledge?

Therefore, the most workable starting point I can think of is the point at which a loving response is evoked in a person, that moment of realisation, of encounter, of confrontation with something beautiful, something of worth, something that compels our hearts to respond. The ability to attune this sense, to seek out such an encounter in each person we come across, to see that which is worth loving, this is the discipline of love. It must come down to a way of perceiving. So, is love a discipline, a commitment to 'know' each other? Or is it still the response to that knowing? If you see a baby and are filled with affection and a sense to care for and protect the baby, but then do nothing to stop a dog from attacking it, did you really love them? But in reality, if you really did have that encounter and had the realisation of love for them, would you do nothing?

I know there will be some Christians out there that would say love cannot work in this way. That we are all full of sin and so there is not anything of intrinsic worth in us to love, and that God loves us only by grace, though we don't deserve it. I disagree with this kind of thinking. But I think the argument comes down to the very nature of love itself, and how it is defined. I would dare to say that people who hold the view that there is nothing in us worth loving would need to hold the definition of love that restricts love to its actions, and not to its motives, which I think logically is an incomplete definition. Any attempt to get to the heart of love must comprehend its motives and causes. The best offering for the view that there is nothing worthy of love in us is the view that love 'creates' worth in the beloved - it creates something that is worthy of its own love. I'm not sure about that. It has merit but it just doesn't seem right. If I love someone, they already exist, and I love them for who they already are, not something I or my love has created. And if I was loving something my love has created, it would not be that person I was loving, but rather my own creation. To truly love a person, we must connect with what is there.

To be continued...

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