Home » Love » Page 2

Tag: Love

A Different Kind of Medicine: Bringing the World of Love to the World of Machinery

Wendell Berry offers an interesting insight about the ‘atmosphere’ of hospitals:

In the hospital what I will call the world of love meets the world of efficiency – the world, that is, of specialization, machinery, and abstract procedure. Or, rather, I would say that these two worlds come together in the hospital but do not meet. During those weeks when John was in the hospital, it seemed to me that he had come from the world of love and that the family members, neighbors, and friends who at various time were there with him came there to represent that world and to preserve his connection with it. It seemed to me that the hospital was another kind of world altogether.

– Wendell Berry, Another Turn of the Crank, p. 101

Why should you visit people in the hospital? Because it is an act of love, which reminds them that their existence is not one of cold steel and machinery alone. It is counter-cultural. It is a different kind of medicine. It is humane because it reminds the sick that they are human despite the chords and wires.

Not Quasi-Physical

Put your arm around somebody. Give someone a hug:

The New York Review of Books of February 3, 1994, for example, carried a review of the correspondence of William and Henry James along with a photograph of the two brothers standing together with William’s arm around Henry’s shoulders. Apropos of this picture, the reviewer, John Bayley, wrote that ‘their closeness of affection was undoubted and even took on occasion a quasi-physical form.’ It is Mr. Bayley’s qualifier, ‘quasi-physical,’ that sticks in one’s mind. What can he have meant by it? Is this prurience masquerading as squeamishness, or vice versa? Does Mr. Bayley feel a need to assure his psychologically sophisticated readers that even though these brothers touched one another familiarly, they were not homosexual lovers?

The phrase involves at least some version of the old dualism of spirit and body or mind and body that has caused so much suffering and trouble and that raises such troubling questions for anybody who is interested in health. If you love your brother and if you and your brother are living creatures, how could your love for him not be physical? Not spiritual or mental only, not ‘quasi-physical,’ but physical. How could you not take a simple pleasure in putting your arm around him?

– Wendell Berry, Another Turn of the Crank, p. 92

“To love a thing without wishing to fight for it is not love at all…”

Chesterton, commenting on the work of Charles Dickens, offers his take on love, and the fight – the fight for love, and against what stands against the beloved.

Here’s the key line:

To love a thing without wishing to fight for it is not love at all; it is lust.

Here’s the context:

All this is, in a humble manner, true for romance. Romance is a shortening and sharpening of the human difficulty. Where you and I have to vote against a man, or write (rather feebly) against a man, or sign illegible petitions against a man, romance does for him what we should really like to see done. It knocks him down; it shortens the slow process of historical justice. All romances consist of three characters. Other characters may be introduced; but those other characters are certainly mere scenery as far as the romance is concerned. They are bushes that wave rather excitedly; they are posts that stand up with a certain pride; they are correctly painted rocks that frown very correctly; but they are all landscape—they are all a background. In every pure romance there are three living and moving characters. For the sake of argument they may be called St. George and the Dragon and the Princess. In every romance there must be the twin elements of loving and fighting. In every romance there must be the three characters: there must be the Princess, who is a thing to be loved; there must be the Dragon, who is a thing to be fought; and there must be St. George, who is a thing that both loves and fights. There have been many symptoms of cynicism and decay in our modern civilisation. But of all the signs of modern feebleness, of lack of grasp on morals as they actually must be, there has been none quite so silly or so dangerous as this: that the philosophers of to-day have started to divide loving from fighting and to put them into opposite camps. There could be no worse sign than that a man, even Nietzsche, can be found to say that we should go in for fighting instead of loving. There can be no worse sign than that a man, even Tolstoi, can be found to tell us that we should go in for loving instead of fighting. The two things imply each other; they implied each other in the old romance and in the old religion, which were the two permanent things of humanity. You cannot love a thing without wanting to fight for it. You cannot fight without something to fight for. To love a thing without wishing to fight for it is not love at all; it is lust. It may be an airy, philosophical, and disinterested lust; it may be, so to speak, a virgin lust; but it is lust, because it is wholly self-indulgent and invites no attack. On the other hand, fighting for a thing without loving it is not even fighting; it can only be called a kind of horse-play that is occasionally fatal. Wherever human nature is human and unspoilt by any special sophistry, there exists this natural kinship between war and wooing, and that natural kinship is called romance. It comes upon a man especially in the great hour of youth; and every man who has ever been young at all has felt, if only for a moment, this ultimate and poetic paradox. He knows that loving the world is the same thing as fighting the world. It was at the very moment when he offered to like everybody he also offered to hit everybody. To almost every man that can be called a man this especial moment of the romantic culmination has come. In the first resort the man wished to live a romance. In the second resort, in the last and worst resort, he was content to write one.

Read it HERE.

To be against the world, contra mundum, is love. Take the above quote with this one from chapter 2 of The Everlasting Man:

But there was something that did not end. There had arisen in that hour of history, defiant above the democratic tumult of the Councils of the Church, Athanasius against the world. We may pause upon the point at issue; because it is relevant to the whole of this religious history, and the modern world seems to miss the whole point of it. We might put it this way. If there is one question which the enlightened and liberal have the habit of deriding and holding up as a dreadful example of barren dogma and senseless sectarian strife, it is this Athanasian question of the co-Eternity of the Divine Son. On the other hand, if there is one thing that the same liberals always offer us as a piece of pure and simple Christianity, untroubled by doctrinal disputes, it is the single sentence, ‘God is Love! Yet the two statements are almost identical; at least one is very nearly nonsense without the other. The barren dogma is only the logical way of stating the beautiful sentiment. For if there be a being without beginning, existing before all things, was He loving when there was nothing to be loved? If through that unthinkable eternity He is lonely, what is the meaning of saying He is love? The only justification of such a mystery is the mystical conception that in His own nature there was something analogous to self-expression; something of what begets and beholds what it has begotten. Without some such idea, it is really illogical to complicate the ultimate essence of deity with an idea like love. If the modems really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day, never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians. It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colorless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family.

Love: Am I Glad that this Person Exists?

If…we had to express in a sentence the meaning of human love as a reflection of and response to God’ sown love, it would be hard to do better than the formula of Josef Pieper: Love is a way of saying to another, ‘It’s good that you exist, it’s good that you are in this world!’

-Gilbert Meilaender , Bioethics: A Primer for Christians, 2nd ed., p. 48.

I actually do not agree that this is the best one sentence idea of love. But I certainly think it is a part of what love is, and a quote worth remembering. I can be happy and thankful for the existence of many things or persons without truly loving them. I am happy for the existence of the people who provide me with clean water every day, but that does not mean that I love them. I am thankful for their service but apathetic toward them personally. I am glad that they exist but might be hesitant to lay my life down for them (that’s a flaw in me, I know that). Yet I certainly will not love them if I do not think that it is good that they exist. It is good, then, I think, to ask yourself this question about the people you interact with daily: Am I glad that this person exists?

In other words, I do not think that you necessarily love someone, or some thing, if you are glad that he, she, or it exists. But I also think that you cannot love a person or thing without being glad that he, she, or it, exists. And so the idea can become one test to the legitimacy of love.

So, ask yourself this about that co-worker who gets on your nerves, or that estranged family member, or that unborn child (the context in which Meilaender uses the quote): Are you glad that they exist? If you are, then it may not mean that you love them. But if you’re not, then you certainly don’t.

Faith’s Greater Son

[Faith] is the means of our spiritual livelihood and subsistence: All other graces like birds in the nest depend upon what faith brings them.

– John Flavel, The Method of Grace, etc, p. 133

A while back I noted (HERE) Henry Scougal’s description of faith as the trunk of a tree stretching out into the life-giving soil that is Jesus Christ. The other graces are branches that reach heavenward toward God and outward toward man. The nutrition, in this analogy, comes from faith’s contact with Christ.

Flavel’s analogy sees faith as a mother-bird feeding her nestlings. Without the spiritual provision of faith, uniting us to Christ, all other graces remain unfed.

If faith is so vital, then, if all else depends on faith, how can the Apostle Paul say that love is greater than faith?:

  • 1 Corinthians 13:13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Because, as Jesus is David’s greater Son, so love is faith’s greater son. Without David, there is no Jesus. His genealogy would be completely different. Yet Jesus is greater than David. And so, without faith there would be no true love. But love is greater. This is the case because, as Thomas Watson puts it,

Other graces make us like Christ, faith makes us members of Christ (A Body of Practical Divinity, p. 126).

It all starts with faith, which stretches out to the soil for nutrition and life. But without love, we will never be able to say that we are like our Savior. And believing in Christ, while essential, is not the ultimate goal – the ultimate goal is being like him. Do not read me wrong here. Faith is essential even to being like him. It is necessary at every step along the way, for faith, like a mother-bird, feeds love. But she is feeding one that is greater than herself.

This also means that it is right to say that sanctification is spurred on as we continually look to our justification. Looking to our justification, using our analogy, is like looking to our mother for food. That is, we look by faith to Christ crucified to find strength to love.

Note: I originally found both quotes in a book I highly, and I mean highly, recommend: A Puritan Golden Treasury, which, as of my writing this, is available for a penny (yes 1 measly cent, plus shipping) on Amazon!

God Is Love, But Love Is Not God

  • 1 John 4:8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

Years ago (maybe around 2002 or so), shortly after I had become a Christian, there was a cryptic little quote that popped up frequently on advertisements for a TBN show that featured a woman musing upon 1 John 4:8. I have tried for a couple of years to locate this video online but have not found it as of yet. If memory serves me correctly the woman in question was making the point that she had come to realize that if God is love, then love is God. Then she went on to repeat herself, multiple times: ‘Love is God, love is God…’

Even as a young Christian, something struck me as odd, and flat out wrong, about this statement. Years later I decided to study 1 John 4:8 in depth and found that no less a heavyweight than Augustine of Hippo made a similar statement:

And this passage declares sufficiently and plainly, that this same brotherly love itself (for that is brotherly love by which we love each other) is set forth by so great authority, not only to be from God, but also to be God (De Trinitate, Book VIII).

In context, if I am not mistaken, Augustine makes his case for such a statement based on his view that the Holy Spirit is indeed Love itself – the Love that is the bond between the Father and the Son. Yet I do not see how that equates to the idea that love is ‘not only from God’ but also God itself.

I take the position that it is idolatrous to claim that ‘love’ is God, and that the realization of this fact is absolutely vital. The classic example of this is Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Several years ago when I preached on this text I cited the the ‘star-crossed lovers’ as the classic fictional example of love-idolatry. I had not actually read the work at that point. But years later, reading it, I came across this line (and it is quite famous). Juliet is speaking to Romeo in Scene II:

Do not swear at all;
Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,
Which is the god of my idolatry,
And I’ll believe thee.

Shakespeare understood quite well what I am about to write.

Romeo was effectively Juliet’s ‘god.’ She lived for him, she died for him. She bucked the rules for him. She broke the commandments for him (not only the first commandment, but the sixth as well). She sacrificed herself upon the altar of love. Romeo was a love that Juliet declared to be a god.

Love becomes God when love becomes the supreme Judge and Justification of all things. I have often used this idea in counseling young people. It is easier to illustrate this than to explain it, so here goes:

Take, for example, a young Christian woman who is living with (and having sex with) her boyfriend. ‘Don’t you realize that sex outside of marriage is wrong?’ she is asked. ‘I know, but I plan to spend the rest of my life with him. I love him. I would never sleep with someone I didn’t love. God knows that I love him,’ is her answer.

That’s the classic pomo (postmodern) Christian answer. But the question therefore becomes, ‘Who then is your God?’

In point of fact, love has become this young lady’s functional god. Love justifies breaking God’s law concerning adultery. Love, then, has become the supreme law-giver. If love says ‘go for it,’ then by all means go for it, regardless of what God says.

The standard idea of ‘how can God judge me if I’m only following my heart’ is actually idolatrous. God will judge us for making our hearts,  love, that is, a ‘god before him.’

Now this post has primarily to do with sexual/romantic love. Adultery of any form (that is, any sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman) is not simply adultery, but idolatry as well (because the approval of the lover, or the pleasure of the self, has become more important than the approval and pleasure of God). But this can be the case with many other forms of love. Love for cars, houses, and material things in general can lead a man to deny himself and follow after riches rather than Christ. Christ is the true ‘pearl of great price’ for which we should be willing, for joy, to give up all. But we often treat many other things as greater pearls because of our love for them.

‘God is love’ suggests that God is love personified. It suggests that we cannot properly understand love, or possess it, or love God and others, unless we understand it in terms of God – who He is, and what He has done. God’s love is manifested supremely in the giving of Christ as a sacrifice for sinners (Rom. 5:8, 1John 4:10). All true love will be consistent, in some way, with the love of God in Christ. It will be sacrificial, it will hurt, it will forgive sins, it will desire the best for the beloved, and it will care about the standard of holiness – God’s Law. But if we elevate love itself to the position of God, we have not only misunderstood love – we have misunderstood God as well. Adultery is idolatry, and idolatry is adultery.

This is not to diminish the importance of love, but to put it in its proper perspective. C.S. Lewis summarizes the point perfectly well in chapter three of The Four Loves:

If Affection is made the absolute sovereign of a human life the seeds will germinate. Love, having become a god, becomes a demon.