A Few More Thoughts on Love

Love, is a complicated thing. I think sometimes I idealize love as something completely detached from emotion, I idealize it as an action and not a feeling. The reason I am generally so emphatic about this is because I’m reacting against our culture which views love as essentially a sexual sort of thing. As infatuation, obsession, blind emotion. Christians, I think, trying to follow C.S. Lewis, say:

"Yes, well, that’s one aspect of love, but that’s romantic love. The type that is between husband and wife."

First of all, if you’ve ever said that, have you actually read ‘The Four Loves’ by C.S. Lewis? Please tell me why you’re quoting from something you haven’t read if you haven’t. If you have, I beg to differ a little.

Romantic love (i.e. marital love) is nothing different at it’s root than love for one’s sister, love for one’s brother, love for one’s parents, love for God. Perhaps it manifests itself in different ways, but I think the root emotion is the same. But my statement then begs a question: is love even an emotion? Isn’t love an action? Isn’t love sacrificing for other people and giving up your rights and comfort and enjoyment for that of others?

I would have answered "yes" to this question, but a few things have brought to my attention a different response. First of all, I was discussing this on my little brother Sam’s forum. I was asking the question ‘is love an emotion’. I made no statement either saying ‘yes it is’ or ‘no it isn’t’ but in my mind, I was asking questions to point to the fact that it *is* action. Then I had a conversation with a friend (Darian) who asked if love as an action and love as an emotion are seperable. The last thing that has changed my mind somewhat is recent personal spiritual experience. I’ve really experienced love of late in a different way than I have before, and my experience has given me a new understanding.

At the very bottom, love is what I said in my previous post: love is a sacrifice of oneself for others. But it is very much more complex than a simple action. Sacrificing ourselves for others does not come naturally to me. I think, as a general principle, it is at least fairly safe to say that love does not come naturally to us as humans stained by original sin. I do not know this for a fact, so I will use myself as an example and won’t presume to speak for others. I might speak in general terms, but I acknowledge the fact that I do not mean to presume that I know all humans and all human nature.

So if love does not come naturally to us as humans with original sin, then how do we love? That, I believe, is what Christ sacrificed himself for: to make for himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works; a people blameless and spotless, redeemed and cleansed from original sin. If God is love, and love is the epitomy of virtue, then we are to love. Christ died so that he could impart by the Holy Ghost love into our hearts. So that he could shed his love abroad in our hearts.

If you’re a Christian, though, you know that God doesn’t just decide one day…  "Hey, you know, I think today I’m going to give Caleb love. I’m going to give him all the gifts of the spirit." No. It is *hard*.  It takes blood. It takes sweat. It takes pain and struggle. You have to work, and you have to make choices.

Life is just a bunch of little choices we have to make. We never think about it, and I think that’s one of the major reasons people fail to live as Christians. They don’t realize they’re walking around every day making a bunch of yes and no decisions. That’s a whole other post though, and I don’t want to get into it at this point. Suffice it to say, you build love with choices. You work at sacrificing yourself for others. Slowly and painfully, you crucify yourself.

I have for a long time worked at love. I’ll tell you, it’s a hard thing, because when you’re a selfish person like me, it really doesn’t feel very pleasant to give up what you want, what pleases you. It really doesn’t feel very pleasent to love others sacrificially and care for them and care about them over myself. Like I said before, to me it doesn’t come naturally. But I will tell you this. After you make the little decisions for a long time, it becomes easier and easier. Loving people becomes almost habit. Giving up yourself over others becomes routine, just as before selfishness was routine. It isn’t overnight, it’s slow and gradual, and it only comes with great effort. But over time it does come, and it becomes more and more natural.

I have found that as I make it habit to put others above myself, recently I don’t need to concentrate on it as much. At first it is more of an action, because it is me saying "Alright Caleb, you are going to do this for this person, and you are not going to do this for yourself. You are going to love this person by putting them over yourself." And it is merely an action I do because so am I commanded to do by my Lord. But as it becomes more engrained into my heart, I find that now sometimes I am filled with compassion and emotion for a given person when I am either talking to them or doing something for them. It is a hard feeling to describe because it is so deep and so encompassing and filling.

As God has pulled me into the direct waterfall of his grace this past year and a half or so, I have tried very hard to love God by my actions and not merely give him mouth service. I have tried very hard to love God with devotion and holiness and serving him and carrying out his commandments. This, I think, is the very root of loving God. But there is much more to it. Just as with other people, at first my love has been merely action (which is not a bad thing, because that is where one must start). It must start with action. But of late, at times I am encompassed by an overflowing love of God. Just a deep sense of awe, of thankfullness, of contemplation of God and his essence, a joy and wonder at his love for me and others. It is most certainly an emotion and not an action. I would like, however, to completely seperate this feeling I’m describing from anything one might feel during ‘worship’ (so-called) where Christians get together and sing songs and get emotionally high. This is most emphatically not an emotional high feeling stimulated by music and fleshly things. It is a deep and serene spiritual love. There is nothing excitable or jumpy or obsessive about it.

One thing I would like to say… ‘romantic’ love is not something different from brotherly love or God love or love of parents or any other sort of love. Yes, there is a physical element, a sexual element that is not present in other relationships, but I think at it’s root romantic love is not obsessive. Infatuation is not love, it is infatuation. In our culture the boundaries have become blurred, and Christians have accepted obsession and infatuation as *good* things as long as they are in the context of marriage. I would say that is most *emphatically* wrong. My love for my wife is the same love I have towards God. Does not Christ use the metaphor of himself and the Church? Do we not have the Song of Solomon where God’s love is metaphorically represented as romantic love?

I do not think infatuation would be an appropriate love for God, because at it’s root it is selfish love. There is no room for blind passion in the Christian marriage, or in our relationship with God. Infatuation is the ‘love’ (so-called) that almost revels in itself. And I will grant that it is not necessarily totally selfish. Some people say it is love that says "I love you so much and I just want to be with you and love you and you just make me feel so good and I just want to be around you and I can’t bear to be away from you…" etc. etc. They say that that is loving one’s self, because you are ‘loving’ the other person for the way they make you feel. Granted this can be true in many cases, but that is not always what infatuation is. It is sometimes just blind passion that will do anything for the object of it’s desire; it is almost madness where one’s mind does not function in a controlled manner. There is nothing good about this sort of love, I think.

I don’t want to make true love sound cold and cool and calculated and calm and reserved. It simply is not that. It is a fire of the hottest coals, but it is not reckless; it is not a forest fire. It is passion of the strongest strain, but it is not destructive or out of control. It is peaceful and joyful and never loud and boisterous. It is powerful and overflowing, but never misdirected or damaging.

I used to abhor the Song of Solomon, because to me it presented a graphic description of human ‘romantic’ love, which I felt completely unworthy to be compared to God. And I think this is a natural reaction, because I have had a limited experiential knowledge of God. I didn’t want to compare God’s love to something demeaning and sexual and fleshly (women have a different problem in their first views of Song of Solomon which I don’t want to address here for brevity’s sake). But I have lost my aversion to Song of Solomon, because I have experienced a deeper love of God than mere action or obedience to his commandments. I am no longer afraid of the metaphor of romantic love for God’s love, because at it’s root it is the same thing, and I have begun to taste the wonderful emotional part of my actions.

As I’ve described, my love has gone from pure action, to a combination of action and emotion. And I don’t just mean my love of God, I mean my love for other people as well. I am not afraid that people will misunderstand my love for them as sexual or romantic somehow, because I truly love them from my heart with emotion as well as action, and I think people can somehow pick up on that genuineness, and I don’t feel that will be misinterpreted.

I would like to emphasize, though, that it is a slow process. Love is a habit, and as the Holy Spirit works in your heart more, as you struggle proactively along the path of virtue and keeping God’s command of loving others, God will slowly mature your understanding and experience of love as your spirit matures. Thus, my conclusion: love is at it’s root sacrificial action and feeling, but inseperable from emotion in it’s more matured state.

Wow. That was like… uh… really… long. Like really really long. I don’t think I’ve written such a long post before… well, maybe I have. At any rate I don’t remember. If you actually read that whole thing, I would be like really impressed. Then I would ask you why the heck you waste so much of your time reading my rambling thoughts on such things as love.