Reformátusok Lapja, 1970 (70. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1970-04-01 / 4. szám
REFORMÁTUSOK LAPJA 11 LOVE IS ... TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING A LECTURE PRESENTED AT THE CALVIN SYNOD YOUTH CAMP, 1969. LESLIE BORSAY Give us this morning, 0 God, more than the comfortable sentiments we have tabled as love. Shock us with the recognition of our lack of love which burns away the pretense in our frequently loveless lives. Speak to us a new judgment in the love which Christ performed. Amen. A series on the subject of love cannot begin without some serious soul searching. I know how difficult that will be. On your part, there is so much other excitement in even being here this week—old friends, new friends, freedom from parents, the pleasure of play and the fantasy of fun—how can you be expected, so early each morning to concentrate on what I or anyone else should say? But there is more—this topic, this week’s theme— love—that is something almost sacred to each one of us. You know what that means. Who can presume to instruct you about such a highly personal experience all of us must have had at some or another time. So perhaps you have come here already with some notion of what love is. But be careful! Love is a slippery, elusive term somewhat like the mercury from a broken thermometer. There it sits in a little silver puddle. But put your finger on it, try to pick it up in your hand; it squiggles like Royal Gelatin, fractures into twenty droplets, runs like its name suggests—quick silver. Have you ever really tried* to define a word. I don’t mean look it up in a dictionary, but put it into your own words, pin it down with your own ideas. Like quick silver, isn’t it? Try even a simple word, a primary word like “blue.” What is it? A color? Good. And what is a color? How do you distinguish it from other colors? What if you’re blind? Have you ever tried describing a color to someone who is blind? Go ahead, look it up in your Funk and Wagnalls. “Blue is one of the chief colors of the spectrum.” What’s a spectrum? Why is it a chief color? When you feel blue, does it mean that you are one of the chief colors of the spectrum? When someone talks about the “blues” in music, does he mean that notes have colors, everything in B flat is brown and G minor is turquoise. Does a rainbow have a sound? Maybe “blue ” was an unfair term. It depends too much on one sense. You have to have eyes to see blue. And even then, some eyes are confused. They can’t see blue. Maybe some eyes can see colors most of us don’t even know exist. O.K. Let’s try another word. Why not “love”? They say that love is blind anyway. You don’t need eyes to see love. Or do you? Maybe some people with perfectly good eyes are as blind about love as others are about colors. What is “love” anyway? Look that up in your. Funk and Wagnalls. I did! It says: “Love is a strong, complex emotion or feeling causing one to appreciate, delight in, and crave the presence or possession of another and to please or promote the welfare of the other.” But in tennis, love means nothing. Tell me this, would you need to know a definition in order to know that you love someone? Why does the dictionary even bother? Better yet, why don’t I just assume that we all know what the word means and go on from there? See, you want me to get on to the juicier parts. Who reads the letters to the editor anyway? You open it at the center fold-out. That’s where the action is! Love is sex, isn’t it? Or maybe Joan Walsh Anglund has the right idea: “Love is a special way of feeling.” Butterflies in your stomach, sweaty palms, blinking eyes, dry mouth, a little bit of the shakes, no appetite, daydreaming all day long, heart pounding, voice quivering. “say, ah, I ah called you up cause ah, I thought ah maybe you, I mean like maybe we could, I mean you could ah go out on Friday night ah with me ah.............. Oh.............you have to go to your little brothers Cub Scout banquet. Gee, I’m ah real sorry about that. Ah, well, ah, good-bye.” Click. Click. And yon could just sit there and cry because you think you are really in love and now you have been hurt. Will you commit suicide? Maybe after supper. Never do anything rash on an empty stomach. But you can’t eat for days. You are in love. That’s a very special way of feeling ... a helluva way of feeling. But is it love? So maybe you want me to tell you how to master this special way of feeling. You want me to draw pictures and diagrams of the art of loving. And then maybe at the tail end of all our discussions, when you are really psyched out by all the beautiful things I would have said about love, then maybe I could sneak in the bit about loving God and your neighbor and all that. Although it’s beyond you by then how you could ever be hung up about God and some guy that lives next door, like when you are really in love. But maybe you’ll play along with this religious game. Saying so that you love God (maybe like you loved your Granddad) and your neighbor (if he’s a nice guy— preferably white—sure why not call it love—you’ll never tell him that of course). But deep down you suspect that I really don’t know what love is all about, and I am really talking about something else. Ministers have a tendency to do that, you know. Then again, you may be the enlightened child of your times. And you know where it’s at. None of this kid stuff for you. You really know that love is a psychedelic trip. The magic word that turns you on. It’s your bag. The magic, mystery bag that will solve all the problems of the world. That will turn all the Mrs. Robinsons cf this world into pillars of salt and will set the Negroes free, bring the boys home from Viet Nam, crush all the nasties who say conservative things, give you freedom, freedom, freedom. But the hippie version of love is only a slogan in search of a program. It is an excuse with beads, and beards, and boots. It is an idea in the middle of a pond without oars or a rudder. Yet, I can’t knock the hippies too hard. At least their boat is in the right pond. I love the hippies for that. They’ve pulled out all the corks in the semblance of Christian love that in our country has passed for the real thing. And I can only cheer as its rotten timbers sink slowly beneath the waters of our times. (To be continued)
