“And if I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”
The ancient text haunts my very existence. I have found myself crushed beneath its colossal truth and left prostate, not in humility, but in submission to its gravity. I run down so many, so many avenues in my life and never find a destination. I have told myself many things of love. I have convinced myself of many things of love. I said that I would never love a beloved unless I knew that beloved, and then I convinced myself that knowing is loving and loving is knowing and the lines become so blurred that all cognitive understanding is demeaned and therefore recognized as lost. I have become convinced that love is closer to hate then we might first realize. They are like close sisters who kiss on the cheek whenever they meet and yet live completely separate lives. They respect each other. I find that when I love, I tend to hate many thing about myself. I hate the way I love, I hate what love does to me, and I hate what this love does to those around me. In this sense, love is very close to hate. So why are we nothing without love. Why is love so critical and how does love remain the antithesis of hate. This ancient text doesn’t end there. It goes on to describe a love that is totally absent of any quality one might remotely associate with hatred.
“Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous, love does not brag and is not arrogant. Does not act unbecomingly, it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices in truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.”
I think that God must be a bit of a helpless romantic himself. The whole story of redemption is a very cliché love story. The sort of things you’ve seen done in a hundred movies. The only difference is that its not real. That sort of love story doesn’t happen. We look up to it, we look forward to it. It never happens, not like that at least. We begin with a character. He is lost in his life, broken in his passions, and without, empty. And then we have the girl enter the seen. At this point I will intentionally start sounding cliché. The girl enters the scene, she is the exact thing that the Man has been wishing he was. Every shortcoming found within him, is completed by her. This dark emptiness becomes filled with her light and he is suddenly a different creature, a new man. The two are wed, and the union lasts forever. Its simple, its glorious, it’s also impossible. If it were possible, it would not be divine. God constantly proved himself by being the impossible. And a love that is all of these things is impossible, and by that, it is not simply that God gives us or has for us this kind of love, its that God is this kind of love. God is love is not the same statement as God has love, or God loves. We are not love, we are so much more hatred than love. We are the lover of the one sister, and therefore a distant relative of the other. We, by our very intrinsic depravity, are closer to hatred than to love, and yet we are constantly compelled to attain something we never can on our own. We are not Gods, we are not even children of the Gods, we are not sparks of light in this universe. We are the void, we are the emptiness longing to be filled. We are impatient, we are unkind, we are jealous, and we are arrogant and very unbecoming. C.S. Lewis wrote a book to explain such a disaster. He argued that unless the Gods give us identity, they will never look down upon us. We are not like the God’s and in their greatness and majesty. It’s is a greater insult to for we to make an appeal to them than for a beggar ask for a kings crown. And here is where the love story resumes. Where the incomplete lover finds his completion, his identity, is within his beloved. His beloved doesn’t simply assimilate his identity, but the lovers identity, that is his areas of deficiency, are conformed to the adequacy of his beloved and now the lover may commune with the divine, because he is like the divine in that he has not simply aroused feelings of love, not simply demonstrated acts of love, but has become love in as much as God is love. As I said before, this is impossible. And therefore, it is God’s doing, it is his love story, and it never occurs outside of him.
