“Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the mornings, what you will do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.”
–Pedro Arrupe, S.J.
Next time you host a dinner party or have a group of friends over, lob this grenade into the crowd and see what happens: “what is love?” Once you sift past the curious stares and nervous laughter, you may actually find someone who genuinely wants to explore the question. If I were that person, here’s what I might say.
Any answer I could give will surely evolve for as long as I’m alive. It’s not that I think love to be some fluid entity. In fact, I hold the very opposite. Love is the foundation, the atoms which make up the air, the elemental beginning of life. It’s just that I feel the answer is beyond human comprehension, and thus, beyond an ultimately satisfying conclusion.
So why even bother attempting to answer such an elusive question? I’ll be blunt. To ignore the question would be simply foolish. Overlooking such a question is to ignore the question of ultimate existence; to overlook what fills our heart with true happiness at the end of the day. I cannot imagine how any reasonable person could ignore this question. You don’t have to believe the same things I do – but don’t ignore the possibilities.
C.S. Lewis believes that no explanation of God will ever fully suffice. Why? God created man. We are filled with God’s spirit. Any way we attempt to account for God’s existence is using the very gift of reason that we received from God. Any attempt we make, however devout, will inherently fall short. The branch cannot account for the tree.
Likewise, I believe the question of love to be intertwined with the question of God; no explanation of love can possibly be complete. From God came love, and from love came life. Out of love, God filled the earth. For God so loved the world, He gave of His only son. We were created and sustained through love; the created cannot explain the creator.
No, it is not love which will change through the years. It is me. With the passage of any threshold moment, any point of time at which I could have gone either one way or another, my view of love will surely mature. As I learn more about myself, I learn more about the divine love within me.
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Before I proceed, I feel I should clarify a bit. The word ‘love’ is quite all-encompassing. Sandy loves her husband Terry, but Sandy also loves her college roommates, running in a gentle April rainstorm, eating chocolate chip ice cream cones, playing bridge with her friends on a Saturday night, and working the crossword in the Tuesday New York Times. The shortcomings of the English language when it comes to the word ‘love’ are well-documented and as obvious as a splotch of Shiraz on a white blouse. For this piece, I’m most interested in the idea of love as a catalyst for Christian marriage. After explaining a few common ideas about love that I find to be inadequate, I will explore an idea about love which I find to be more satisfying.
Falling in love, in and of itself, doesn’t interest me. This is the image of love we are most commonly – and quite forcefully – exposed to in today’s culture. Our culture rapidly circulates what one of my favorite college professors, a Resurrectionist priest, described as the “myth of romantic love.” This is the myth which says there’s a woman for every man, and once the two find each other, they will fall in love and live happily ever after. What a myth it is.
By waiting for this “right” person to enter our lives, we eliminate personal accountability. If we decide to date someone, we wait for some feeling or sign that we’re dating the “right” person – and good luck finding a concrete answer to that mystifying question. But, one way or another, people do find some answer that allows them to place all their hope and trust in this human feeling, that the other is somehow “meant” for them, and the two decide to marry. Maybe this works out for some, but goodness, what an incredible gamble this is!
For how many times have people fallen out of love when the luster fades from its opening brilliance? If a boy falls and scrapes his knee, the pain he feels certainly is real. But put some Neosporin and a band-aid on the knee, and soon enough the wound will be but a fading scar on the boy’s body, and not long after that, an evaporating memory. If this is the model of love which people most often look toward, no wonder the divorce rate is so staggeringly high. There must be more substance to love; something so divinely rooted cannot be so temporally transient.
Other people may claim to surrender themselves to love. They can’t help but be madly in love with their special someone, one such person may say. This holds much more water with me than the knee-scraping scenario, because surrendering to love touches upon love’s unrelenting power. But still, shouldn’t love carry something more than a connotation of a fear-driven submission of a weaker opponent to a greater power? Love conquers all – especially trifling men and women who fall victim to its hold? I don’t think this is quite right, either.
Nay, love is neither a fall nor surrender; such terms portray a weakness that love never knew.
Love is not dependency, either. Just as God gave us free will, love is a free choice we make. God wasn’t forced to fill the earth with mankind to prove His greatness, but He did so out of love, so all of humanity could delight in His glory. Similarly, when we truly love somebody, we can live without the other, but we choose to begin a life together anyway, delighting in the abundant blessings the other provides.
Even though intense dependency appears to bind two people together, true love diminishes as dependency rises in a relationship. Expressions such as “she makes me so happy” and “I’d just die without him” seem innocent – and even romantic if said with any degree of elegance – but they cleverly mask a common misconception about love and the effects of dependency. Would you really die without him? Does she actually control your happiness? These must only be metaphors, figurative representations of one aspect of love, and never incarnations of the love itself. Taken literally, they suggest a type of parasitism that is wholly incompatible with the free choice to love.
Even worse is codependency, where two people are together because they accept and enable each other’s faults. Codependents make no strides toward growth or overcoming their weaknesses; a husband addicted to pornography compromises with his licentious wife in order to maintain their destructive – yet addictive – patterns of behavior. Any such relationship which claims to be loving is nothing more than a charade.
Love is not independence, either. In a genuinely loving relationship, either party cannot only consider what is best for them, ignoring the other. Love is not something that occurs only after everything else is taken care of. Its health demands mutual attention.
Some people shy away from love over a desire to remain independent. This is a fallacy that assumes that once they give themselves to love, their entity will somehow merge with the other. Scripture does tell us that Christian marriage binds two bodies together as one, but to think that either person’s distinctiveness entirely dissipates, I believe, serves to propagate a misunderstanding about love.
One of the most reasonable accounts of love I’ve ever heard says that love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. Paraphrasing a bit, love is the choice to step into something unknown in order to develop the divine spirit inside yourself or another. Or! The presence of that smallest of conjunctions unlocks a vast amount about the possible nature of love.
This means that you can love without ever being in contact with another person. As long as you decide to challenge your own complacency and become closer to God, you are modeling love. Of course, it’s nearly impossible to explore the unknown in some sort of hermetic bubble; it’s difficult to imagine any liminal moment that doesn’t involve at least one other person.
But to me, this says that in order to love any other, you must first love yourself. Love: to love yourself before you can love another; to absolutely trust yourself before you can give your absolute trust to another; to truly accept your own flaws before you can accept the flaws of another. True loves comes forth from within.
This hypothesis fits within the niche carved out by Christian tradition, where the Creator God channeled love from within and sent it outward toward what would become the created world. From God came love, and from love came life. Out of love, God filled the earth. For God so loved the world, He gave of His only son. Once you love yourself, the possibilities are limitless. Here are just a few.
Love banishes anything passive in favor of an active quest for self enlightenment. Love blasts open even the most trembling of hearts in search of the divine spark within. Love is a key that unlocks the door to the soul. Simply, love decides everything.
With this kind of love, there’s no falling into anything. You deliberately step into love, not knowing where you’re going to end up when you take that first step, yet desiring more than anything else to find out. You’re skydiving without the parachute; but don’t worry, love gives you wings of your own. We might crash once or twice along the way, but love also gives us the strength to pick ourselves up and continue. Like God, love is something which challenges and sustains. By opening yourself to love, you open yourself to the greater depths of your own person.
St. Paul could have had something like this in mind when he wrote to the people of Corinth. In his oft-quoted love poem, his urging to relinquish their childish ways reflects the quest to find a greater love. Like a noisy gong or a clashing symbol, the feeling of love is something capable of generating quite a bit of noise, yet prone to a gradual fade. Now, we see love dimly as in a mirror; our view is incomplete, changing with the angle at which we look. Yet once we step away from the mirror to get a better view of divine love, face to face, the smoke begins to clear.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. But no feeling I have ever felt – joy, sorrow, happiness, despair – can endure a single season, let alone anything greater. Without the despair of Good Friday, the joy of Easter Sunday isn’t as potent. There is a time and a season for all feelings; but unless they are backed by something greater, like a sunflower without water, they will wither up and die.
Extending yourself for the purpose of mutual spiritual growth, you develop a bond – a sacred bond – with the other. Sealed by the grace of God in the act of marriage, this sacred bond tightens as the two truly live with the other in mind. When in love, two people depend on each other for their own individual growth. Once extended outward toward another, love becomes interdependence, and self-sacrifice becomes a desire rather than a burden.
The Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran offers the single most beautiful take on the interdependence of love I have ever read. Borrowing from what is his best-known work, The Prophet, I won’t even attempt to paraphrase this man’s words without first giving his lyrical brilliance its proper due:
Let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Love is a tango in which two people glide around the dance floor in search of beautiful poetry, yet it is in the presence of the space between them that brings about the perfection. Without the entry and re-entry into this space, the tango is incomplete. Love, too, delights in unity while leaving room for growth.
Once we’ve made the choice to love the other, the feeling of love – the butterflies in the stomach, the desire to be nowhere else but at the side of your love, the mushy happily-ever-after feelings – now possesses much more legitimacy. The two kinds of love should never be understood to be mutually exclusive; in fact, more often than not it is the feeling of love which leads people toward making an ultimate commitment to love somebody else for a lifetime. And any healthy marriage will surely have an abundance of the moments that touch the heart and make you swoon: and swoon away, my dear, because your partner has already made the decision to catch you every time you begin to fall.
If love is indeed a choice, then why is it so difficult to get over lost love? Quite frankly, because in the words of Pedro Arrupe, love changes everything. After we have made the choice to extend our own self for the purpose of spiritual growth for ourselves and the other, doors are opened that can never be closed. A fire is lit that will never be extinguished. The fire can be ignored – and even suppressed, aided largely by the passage of time – but it will always remain. The bond can not be broken. The pain is a pain of loss, and it is one which will never be completely forgotten.
One final point: do we have to have everything figured out in order to love? All our questions answered? No; by its very nature, love extends the boundaries of the self, thus making the person able to love more and continue to grow along the way. In the words of the 20th century German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, we then live our way into the answer. To truly live is to love; love illuminates the way:
I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Do not be afraid to sit with your questions about love; you’re sitting with a part of God.
–end–
