Love? Give me a break!

It’s easy to be cynical about love.

Besides being “what makes a Subaru a Subaru,” it’s the favorite word of all manner of popular songs, movies, TV shows, even porn. As sad as is the “hookup culture” – about which I wrote a few weeks ago – at least it doesn’t pretend to be what it’s not. It’s about sex, not “love.”

Let’s face it, for young males in our society especially, the concept of love is troublesome. It comes off as a cultural construct translating into the “M” word or some similar commitment, and commitment risks freedom. It’s nebulous and ambiguous on the one hand and obvious and a given on the other. It can apply to someone in a marriage, a “relationship,” to family, to “our fellow men” and for religious people, God. At best, it’s confusing.

Love in the context of God and religion may be the most bewildering.

I once attended a Catholic Mass in which the priest came to the pulpit at the time of the homily and after an uncomfortably long pause to make sure he had everyone’s attention, said, simply, “Love.” Then he walked away to continue the Mass. Although I got his point – that in a way, it’s all that’s required of a Christian - it was way too dramatic for me.

Religion and love

Let’s consider a few questions surrounding the subject of love and religion. (Read “Christianity” here. I believe the Jewish idea of love is close to that of Christianity, but I don’t know enough about other faiths to comment. I have a notion, however, that all major religions promote love and understanding among all people, although corruptions of some faiths promote division and contempt for people unlike them.)

“Love” is one of those equivocal words that mean different things in different contexts. That accounts for a lot of the confusion. Even for Christians, it has several meanings.

Arguably the most significant quote ascribed to Jesus in the New Testament actually came, like many of his sayings, from the Hebrew Bible. The scene in Mathew’s gospel has a lawyer, doubtlessly a lawyer of the Law of Moses, asking Jesus to name the “greatest commandment.”

He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” ‘This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.” The author of the Letter to the Romans wrote something similar. “…for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law.” Almost four centuries later, St. Augustine is said to have taken up this theme: “Love and do what you want.”   

Preachers attribute lots of attributes to God without saying where they’re derived. But if there’s any attribute that has a solid foundation in the Bible and Christian tradition it’s the love that God has for us and his/her expectation that we love one another. Both loves are monumentally difficult to understand and to put into practice.

Assuming God’s role as the First Cause of this enormous and wondrous universe, how is it possible that he knows about me, let alone cares about me or “loves” me? And knowing so little about God, how can we be expected to return the love? As for love of “neighbor,” is that realistic? Does God know my neighbors – friends, family members, acquaintances, the random people I see or meet? If he/she did, God would know how difficult it is.  

Importance of the Bible for knowing God

This is why you could be a deist, at most, by believing only in a creator but not a religion. At least in Christianity and Judaism, the Bible is critical for knowing about God. If you revel in the beauty and order of the universe, you might deduce that God loves humans. But only through the Hebrew and Christian Testaments could you know that God is loving and invites us to love in return. (Ok, so the Hebrew Bible at times describes a revengeful and intolerant God, but for its time that was not incompatible with love.)

Like faith itself, the ardor surrounding love of God comes and goes. At times, you’re in awe at his/her goodness and generosity. At other times, you blame God for everything that goes wrong and love is hard to muster. Overall, however, faith results in love, whose first definition in the dictionary is “a strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties.”

For a Christian, the fact that God loves those around me and those far away, from the millions in the slums to the wealthiest and famous, makes it hard not to do the same. That results in an overall feeling of good will toward others, the need to give them the benefit of the doubt, the desire to help them in any way you can.

There is also the “love” of intimate relationships and the love for friends, human instincts to which Christians can give added meaning.

The idea and practice of love must be high on the menu of searchers for truth/God, despite the fact that the dictionary has nine major meanings for the word. The searcher for God can be skeptical about love, but never cynical.