Love One Another

1 Corinthians 13; Ecclesiastes 4:9-12

We seem at a loss to understand the depth and breadth of love. We reduce love to feeling good with another person, readily discarding the relationship when the feeling fades. Despite being able to connect to anyone in the world in an instant, we have a hard time being connected to anyone in any true sense of connection. We equate being loved with gratification--those who meet our wants are those who love us. We move further from love rather than experiencing its power, hope, and redemption. Divorce rates soar. Children are born into family-less contexts. We grow increasingly alienated, lonely, and cynical.

We need to rethink just what love actually is.

It is not a romantic comedy, although, comedy will certainly be present within it. In romantic comedies, a couple meet, fall into the pitfalls and pratfalls of each other's neuroses, fall apart, then suddenly slam together, and the movie fades with a "happily ever after." In the end, there is no mess, no bother--that simply got the first hour of the movie past.

Love is messy. But love is also divine.

Lesson 1--love is presence. To love someone, you need to be present with them and for them. To be with someone is to be with them without distraction. When you are with someone, they take center stage. You give them the space to be most important. We know what this feels like--it is when someone is there in a way that you experience the fullness of their being. A running partner suddenly feels the presence of their friend. They draw strength from each other just by running side by side. They are not competing--no one is a half-step ahead--rhythms are matched. Their strides flow into gentle harmony. In a marriage, such miraculous moments occur when one is fully with the other. They may not have to speak a single word--the closeness speaks for itself. You pass a country farmhouse and there are Ma and Pa on the front porch, rocking the afternoon away. They are together powerfully and presently. They are with one another. Now being there FOR someone takes that presence and makes it intentional. You make being present a goal. You make it a goal because the other person is important enough to you to make it so. This presence asks, "What do you need?" before any other question. It becomes selfless--not in a negative way, but in the fullness of knowing that be there for another is the most fulfilling way to be. It embodies the strange economics of faith--the more one gives, the more one receives; the emptier one becomes, the more full one is.

This stance is anathema to our world. All good things begin "self-" and end with fulfillment, indulgence, and gratification. Thus, when we try to live this way, we find heaps of distractions, hurdles, and hindrances. They will come, so don't fight them--pass through them with an eye to regaining presence. Speak your distraction to your beloved. Let them know you want to be with them, but that you are being pulled in other directions. Together, you can re-center and recapture your equilibrium.
Lesson 2--love is listening. To love someone, really listen to them--i.e., tune in well enough to take in their words. Hear things well enough to hear not only what is obviously said, but what is said within those words. That takes the effort of using one's mind as well as one's ears. Allow your heart to open to the person speaking. Embrace them with your listening. Look at them when you listen to them. Use your eyes to see what they feel as they speak. Let them know that, at that moment, there is nothing else to do but listen to them.

Again, this lesson is anathema to our world. We live in the noisiest age ever seen. There is noise everywhere--noise meant to drown out our thoughts, feelings, and even presence. It is meant to move us through a store, or get us to stay and buy something, and sometimes that noise is visual. TVs infest every wall in a restaurant, distracting us. Our attention spans grow stunted. Disconnection results and many of us feel no one hears us. How can they? Turn it off--turn everything off but your beloved. Listen to him or her. Hear them.

Lesson 3--love is work. To give yourself to another and to take them into yourself is work, no way around it. Paul made this abundantly clear as he listed the attributes of love--patient, kind, selfless, humble, etc. Love is not going to be bliss; it will be joy. Never confuse those two things. Bliss passes and fades like ephemera. Eating Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia is bliss, but as soon as the spoon drags across the cardboard bottom of the tub, the realization that you just ate over 1000 calories and took in four times your daily allowance for fat hits and bliss is gone. Joy is eternal. It is shalom--the everlasting peace of being settled in your own skin as a child of God, no matter what else is before you. Love endures the mess of being human; and the mess we make of our loves and lives. Love does not quit when it gets hard, it digs in. Love does not stop when here is separation, it seeks reconciliation. Love seeks to bond souls together.

And still again, the world finds such thinking to be anathema. Sacrifice? Not today! Endurance? What is this, a marathon? Nope. Pain? Not a chance--pleasure is all! But as with us as individuals--as we experience the fullness of life--i.e., its highs and its lows, the good with the really bad, the success with the failure--we become more fully who we were meant to be as endure to see love grow into real and actual love. Being with a beloved through the pain forges the bond ever more strongly. To be there for another as the bottom drops out steels the connection into place. Trust blossoms into devotion. And the world becomes a whole lot less scary.

Love one another. God dwells within us as we do so. Love one another and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. Love one another and find the fullness and completeness God so hopes for us in making us.

Go and try it.