Reformátusok Lapja, 1970 (70. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1970-06-01 / 6-7. szám
12 REFORMÁTUSOK LAPJA LOVE IS... TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING (Continued from April issue) Where was all that Christian love anyway when the atomic bomb was dropped on the largest Christian city in Japan? Or where is all that Christian love when Detroit continues to make unsafe cars that tempt you, dare you to drive at unsafe speeds on our national network of unsafe highways. Or does love have anything to do with credit cards that invite you, seduce you to spend twice what you could afford? Or where is love in our polluted skies, spoiled streams, rapidly destroyed forests and wildlife? The hippies have set up love as a judgment against our loves of profit, power and personal gain. But a slogan can’t shield us from our sins. Love beads are no magic amulets to ward off the evils so characteristic of the human race. Words! Up until now we have only traded in words, slogans, ideas. Where in all the welter of words and mass of meanings does love fit in? Is it not just a feeling? Even a special kind of feeling? Like when you have travelled long on the road and finally stop and go in and spot the doors which say “Ladies,” “Gentlemen.” And if love is just a feeling, how could we talk about it except by using all kinds of examples like how I felt when I thought I felt in love? Perhaps the problem is that love is not one thing. It may be many different things lumped into one overworked word. Surely each of us has his or her own idea. Could it be that love needs to be defined by each individual? But then what is our standard? How can we communicate if each one of us has his own private world of meanings? Isn’t that just the reason why we have the so-called generation-gap? When your parents tell you that they love you and that’s why they want you to be home by eleven on Saturday night—the love they are talking about, is that love? Some experts tell us that the whole problem is that we don’t communicate. Your words and my words and someone else’s words are all the same sounds but they don’t mean the same thing—they can’t mean the same thing if we are all allowed to decide for ourselves what our words mean. So there must be some common ground, a place where we can communicate—tell each other where it’s at and stop putting each other on with our own language game. Somehow there must be that magic moment in our conversations when suddenly we know that the other person is really tuned in on what we are saying. Otherwise our words are elusive butterflies flitting through some nets with holes too wide, getting crushed in the scramble of sounds that mean nothing. So what is love? Maybe we are expecting the wrong thing. Maybe I have been putting you on all along. Suppose then that love is not a thing. It isn’t a thing that can be neatly packaged in a definition all tied up with pretty wirds. You can’t simply see it like a color, smell it like perfume, feel it like a hand in yours, taste it like lipstick, hear it call your name. All the stereophonic refrains of every recording repeating the word cannot tell you more than this: Love is something you do. It is an experience you participate in. Let’s stop there for a moment. It is not ,1 definition we need, but an experience! Now we get toward the heart of the matter and admittedly the going becomes complicated. Hang on there with me and let’s see it through. Our problem has been that we have been talking about a noun when really we should have spoken about a verb. I love, you love, he, she, it loves. Love is something you do; something that is done to you; something that happens. It is, first of all, an experience you participate in. Love cannot be defined. It must be experienced. But does that really solve our problem? The next question is, “How do you know that it is love?” Well, one thing is for sure. You can’t know it in the abstract. You can’t know it in a dictionary way. What good are the words without the experience? It is like romantic poetry, even the poetry of Rod McKuen. It only deepens the nostalgia after something that is really not there. It’s Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows. But love is not even concealed in those words, those lines—only sorrow for a love that is not happening anymore. And another thing is for sure, if love is an experience, there must be a pattern, an ultimate example at the very heart of existence which is its concrete expression. In other words, there must be an experience of love which precedes all other experiences, which makes all other experiences of love possible, an absolutely universal experience that is love. You see, I want to get away from definitions and logical arguments, and even mathematical formulas—as if computers could make love happen as easily as they can match you up with a date. I want to talk about loving. But how could I without also telling you that you are loved. All this leads up to three brief words: God is love. If this would have been a sermon, that would have been my text. The First Letter of John, the 4th chapter, the 7th through the 12th verses, and again the 16th verse through to the end of the chapter. What does it say there? According to the New English Bible it reads: “Dear Friends, let us love one another, because love is from God.” Notice here that John is not trying to slip in a definition of love. He is simply wanting us to become lovers. But why? Not because he thinks that love is of itself something good. Not because love is a special way of feeling that he wants us to have. Not because love makes the world go around. There is some truth in each of those as we shall come to see. But the reason why is “because love is from God.” O.K. Love is from God. But so are our eyes, our ears, our sense of touch, and sense of taste. What is the big difference? John makes it very simple. “God is love.” With eyes and ears and touch and taste we can only approximately know about God. And after all, who has heard Him, who has seen Him face to face? God is revealed in all our senses but in one very special sense, we know God is love. But be careful. I didn’t say that Love is God. Love
