Letter #123: What's It Gonna Cost Ya?

Baby, don't hurt me.

Dad,

You have raised the eternal question, posed throughout the ages by the likes of Plato, C.S. Lewis, and mid-’90s Trinidadian Eurodance sensation Nestor Haddaway: “What is Love?”

There have been many answers: love is a hunger for the essence of goodness and beauty. Love is a sincere desire for the good of another. Baby don’t hurt me. All helpful, in their way. But all too easily, as you indicate, blurred into self-indulgent mush or hardened into vindictive moralism.

Once you’re in the realm of smiling indulgently on your kid’s sex binges or browbeating a stranger for his politics “out of love,” well, to paraphrase Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride...I do not think that word means what you think it means.

This is why it’s so useful, as you discussed in your essay, to apply the Jesus Test. When God steps bodily into the picture he must of necessity re-center it, funneling down the wide range of possible interpretations into the narrow path he walks. In Romans 5, Paul uses Jesus as ballast in just this way: “God demonstrates his own love for us in this—that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Now there’s a clue. Love isn’t only an abstraction you define but also something you do—something God does. And the distinctive stamp of love, the holy seal marking all its actions, is sacrifice. Again: “Greater love hath no man than this: to lay down his life for his friends.” Quoth the big guy himself.

When I see people berating each other—or sometimes, for reasons I couldn’t possibly fathom, me and you—when in my worst moments I end up shouting my face blue “out of love,” I have to ask myself: what has this cost you? What did you have to offer of yourself in exchange for heckling a stranger online? Money? Not a cent. Effort? A few keyboard strokes. Time? Hardly any. If it doesn’t come with the risk of relationship, at the price of compassion, it ain’t love.

And maybe there is a definition in there somewhere. Because I would even say that the things you do sacrifice for—the people and pursuits into whom you pour your attention, your energy, your patience, your heartache, your life—that’s what you love. Personally, I know that keeping a watch on what I give that costs me, and to whom, is a better measure of what I really love than almost anything else.

Which means love is, among other things, an investment. You give of yourself to get something back in return. With the normal kinds of love, the value you expect is fairly obvious. People who love money hope to buy things with it. People who love sex hope to get something too—connection, maybe, or pleasure. Heck, even people who love football hope to get entertainment. But the people who love God and his broken creatures—really love them, to the point even of death—hope against hope to get joy and life everlasting.

(What is) Love,
Spencer