What Is Love Anyway? If God Is Love...Is Love God?
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The word “LOVE” is so loaded and corrupted. People talk of love---magazines and newspapers tell us how to find it, and missionaries talk everlastingly of love. I love my country, I love my king, I love some book, I love that mountain, I love pleasure, I love my wife, I love God. Is love an idea?
If it is, it can be cultivated, nourished, cherished, pushed around, twisted in any way you like. When you say you love God, what does it mean? Does it means that you love the idea of the God that you decided to believe (out of the choices presented to you over the years and for most it was just what they were born into)? For many it is the projection of the good things about yourself clothed in certain forms of respectability according to what you have come to see as noble and holy. If so, to say, “I love God,” is absolute nonsense. If you worship God, you are worshipping yourself---and that is not love.
Because we cannot solve this human thing called “love,” we present it in abstractions. Love may be the ultimate solution to all man's difficulties, problems and travails, but how are we going to find out what love is?
Defining does not necessarily help. The church has defined it one way, society another, and there are all sorts of deviations and perversions. Adoring someone, sleeping with someone, the emotional exchange, the companionship---is that what we mean by love? This has been the norm, the pattern, and it has become so tremendously personal, sensuous, and limited that religions have declared that love is something much more than this. In what they call human love, most religions see there is pleasure, competition, jealousy, the desire to possess, to hold, to control and to interfere with another's thinking; and knowing the complexity of all this, they say there must be another kind of love, divine, beautiful, untouched, uncorrupted.
Throughout the world, so-called holy men (even Jesus) have maintained that to look at a woman a certain way is something totally wrong: (some say you cannot come near to God if you indulge in sex), therefore they push it aside although they are eaten up with it (radical muslims). But by denying sexuality verbally, they put out their eyes and cut out their tongues for they deny part of the whole beauty of the earth. They have starved their hearts and minds; they are dehydrated human beings; they have banished beauty because beauty is associated with woman, and so now they love death and destruction instead, hoping to be blessed with seventy virgins by Allah.
Can love be divided into the sacred and the profane, the divine and the human, or is there only love? If I say, “I love you,” does that exclude the love of others? Is love personal or impersonal? Moral or immoral? Family or non-family? If you love all of mankind, can you love a particular person or should it be different? Is love a sentiment? Is love a feeling? Is love pleasure and desire? Is it all of these? The answer is as varied as there are types of people and experiences. All these questions indicate that we have ideas about love, ideas about what it should or should not be, a pattern or a language code developed by the culture in which we live.
What does that mean for us? Sometimes, love relationships are just games, and there are surprises, gains, losses and learning in the game…it can be dangerous; you may search for someone you found valuable in another person and never find it. The more you know someone, the more clearly you can see their flaws. This is why friendships don't last, marriages fail and children are abandoned. You might think you love someone until you see the way they act when they're out of money, under pressure or hungry, etc. Is love choosing to serve and be with someone in spite of their filthy heart. Love is said to be patient and kind. Is love deliberate? Is Love sometimes hard and painful; is it seeing the darkness in another and defying the impulse to jump ship? Is it also giving room for and protecting a fragile and wandering heart?
Can we really know love until we have experiences not love? How can we know compassion until we have first experienced loss? Or love until we have also known what is to be hated, or worse still, totally cut off from other human beings for long periods of time? How can we know love except through experience. If God is love, then it stands that love is God…or at least as close as we can get to the supernatural as humans.
enough