Letter #122: Who Can Solve Its Mystery?
What Is This Thing Called Love?
Sport
When I was reading your letter — and, in fact, while I was writing my essay — I kept thinking back to this argument I once had in the locker room of my old tennis club. It was a friendly argument but a spirited one with a pal whose politics differed sharply from my own. At one point, I mentioned that his solution to some problem was unconstitutional. He immediately shot back, “The Constitution is a living document.” I shot back just as immediately, “A living document, not a blank one.”
To his credit, even he laughed.
My point, obviously, was that we’ve come into a time when I would say of America’s founding documents, what you said of the Bible: I “would rather each word mean only one thing than that every word mean anything.” And this holds true not just in matters of politics and religion. My poor colleague Matt Walsh still gets death threats because he wandered around asking people to define the word woman.
Freedom. Marriage. Racism. Much depends on definitions, especially if a powerful and monolithic cabal of corrupt elites should take it upon itself to destroy the careers, reputations, businesses and lives of those who insist these words ought to continue to mean what they have always meant before.
Not saying that has happened, mind. Just if it should. If.
In the Bible, there is, of course, one word that needs to be defined more than any other, the word on which all the others hang. As Cole Porter put it: “What is this thing called love?”
Whenever I mention the primacy of love in understanding the gospels, the need to consult with love before acting on an isolated commandment, the need to hold even the inspiration of the inspired up to the light of love so to see through to the core of their intentions, there is always someone who objects. Yes, they say, but love is sometimes critical, fierce, even punitive. Sometimes to lead those you love to eternal happiness, you have to make their mortal lives a misery. The minute I hear these objections, I grow suspicious. I wonder: what happened to the part of love that looks like love?
Yet also, I understand. Soft-focus sentimentality is so often used to mask intellectual corruption. The word love especially melts all too easily into a feeling state with no reference to the good of the allegedly beloved.
Perhaps a clue to the word’s meaning lies in the dual commandment: Love God with all your heart and soul and mind; love your neighbor as yourself. The first part implies a full surrender of your ego to a greater good. The second part calls on you to include another ego within your own. To do the second, you must truly understand how far you are from achieving the first.
“Love is patient,” begins Paul’s famous passage in Corinthians. I think there’s a very good reason to start the definition there.
Love, as it were,
Dad
Brilliant.
Love is one of the most important aspects of the gospels, otherwise when Jesus was asked what the most important commandment was, He wouldn’t have answered what He did. Such an answer must have realllly shocked the people at the time: “What do you mean love?? You mean to say there’s no easy 3-step-process to make it into Heaven??”
I still wonder, how does one love God with all his heart, might, mind, and strength? I think you’re right. It starts with submitting yourself to something infinitely more powerful than you.
Thank you for your wise words, your Klavanness
My husband and I have a policy to try to believe all the good we hear and only the bad we see, and it really stems from Paul's passage. (It's been a good guideline even if imperfectly practiced!) However, I kind of wish we still had different words for love as the ancients had. Whenever I read 1Cor 13: 4-8, I mentally substitute "love" with "charity." "Charity is patient, charity is kind..." I find it helpful personally to separate this practical kind of love from the smushy kind we just all kind of naturally think of these days. But this passage is also my own personal filter for who I take seriously online. I've chosen to unfollow some "professional Christians" (mostly from the old blogosphere) when it seemed to me there was just a little too much rejoicing in wrongs when they hurt people they disliked, or a lack of belief in the good will of their fellow Christians.