Preaching to the Choir: Yet another treatise on love.

I haven't written in a while and the thoughts have been stewing, so brace yourselves, this is gonna be long. I bet you'll never guess what the topic of this sermon is :)

[Disclaimer: I'm having some trouble figuring out how to control the formatting here... so, don't be draw into wondering what my changes in font size or type might mean, it is all a chasing after the wind ;) ]

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing...

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears...

These three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13

The time has come. Time to speak once again - but more directly, perhaps? - about what is so mysterious and sacred, so wonderful and terrifying that it feels almost defiling to name it. And yet, what else is worth speaking of? I'll speak of love.

This morning I've been pondering those moments in my life when the only word I can find to describe the experience is "love."

Love is, I've come to believe, all that is real, all that is substantial.
Love is knowing deeply; love is beauty in motion, beauty in interaction; love is the reality of joy in pain; love is gut-wrenching goodness; love is being deadly, humiliatingly honest and finding after the torrent that the truth did not leave you alone. The Other is still standing there, still looking in your eyes, still touching your now admittedly defiled hands, your unclean lips.

Love is not always so grand and dramatic though. Not always a movie moment. Love, perhaps, is our ability to lay down defenses and connect with another. I remember many times in Bangladesh randomly meeting people who would walk with me for a block or two as I went about my day, and as vast as the separation of culture, language, and religion was between us, when we parted I'd find myself acutely aware of the elation of my spirit. And every so often I'd surprise myself with the thought: "so this is love." So different than what I'd imagined it to be... and at moments I could see, so much better.

I've struggled for a long while now, since the death of my childhood faith, in finding a working knowledge of what it means to follow God, and how - after I'm able to decide this - I can actually do such a thing, and communicate this with those around me. I've noticed the problem most glaringly in prayer. Living in the city that, ironically, declares itself the Church of Christ mecca, I am constantly bombarded by requests for prayer. Even casual acquaintances daily say things like "I'll keep you in my prayers" or, after talking about a problem, they'll say "I'd appreciate your prayers about that." It is an awkward moment for me. Because, the truth is, I can't pray for them, and I don't really want them to pray for me. Not because I don't care, I care immensely, but because it doesn't make sense to me anymore.

My cognitive dissonance will not allow me to pray for these things. I can't pray for my exams, or my friends who are struggling in relationships, or my cousin who is dying because I know that today and for countless days in the past multitudes are suffering constantly in ways neither myself nor anyone I know in this country have experienced. So I simply can't get my mind around petitioning God for some healing or happiness for my loved ones when he is clearly not providing it for those who have, since the day they were conceived, been exponentially worse off than we.The only thing I find myself able to say to anyone any more, the only thing I want from them, and the only thing that seems to matter, is: I love you. I can't ask God to calm your anxiety, or change your world, but I do love you, and I will choose to love you tomorrow, and the day after that. Tomorrow a nuclear bomb may hit our country, tomorrow your mother may die, tomorrow I may be diagnosed with AIDS, but I will still love. I can't help wondering if this could this be, in a way, what Jesus said to us.

So, I am tempted to be one of those people who goes around saying trite (though truthful) things like “stop whining about your food, children are starving in China” (I would probably instead specify South Asia, and get made fun of as I pronounce "B-ah-ngladesh"), but, as my inner therapist constantly reminds me, ignoring our own distress and suffering - however minuscule it may seem in comparison to others' - will not help us in the cause of love. We must acknowledge our own experience of life, we must be allowed to know who we are through our own trials and pain, or we could not know and love others.

Because of a romantically broken heart (there must be a better way to say that...) rather early in my teen years, for a long time I had a silly obsession with asking God why I was pretty if it was not for a man. Setting aside the possible immaturity or merit to be seen in this quandary (and especially my annoyance with gender socialization in the church), it mattered deeply to me for many years, then somewhere along the road was discarded and forgotten. Yesterday, however, as I stood at my bathroom sink for a moment, I caught my own eyes in the mirror, and the shadow of that question rose in my mind, but this time, without anger or grief. It rose quietly.

“Why am I beautiful?”

And, quietly, a reply came.

“Because, Emily, everyone is beautiful.”

Silence. Everyone is beautiful. Yes.

“What for though? For pain, for separation, for torture, for brokenness?”

“No. Everyone is beautiful for love.”

For love.

C.S. Lewis says that before he became a Christian one of his main arguments against the existence of a good God was the chaotic, evil state of the world. He had (as we all could) countless examples of the perpetual, senseless horror that takes place on earth, and concluded (as many do) that no loving/good/orderly God could be a part of this. Then somewhere along the way, Lewis wondered why, if there is no good God, he knew that the world was not good (i.e. If you've never seen a puzzle, how would you know that all the little bits of cardboard were meant to be placed together to make a picture?). And that was part of Lewis' new belief. He says something like this: "there is a deep picture of goodness and order in me, and I couldn't have learned this from the world, so it must be from a good God."

I've returned to Lewis' apology many times in my own struggle to understand and relate to God and the world. In the past couple of years, though, I've found its ability to comfort and sustain my faith waning. In the face of a deeper understanding of human suffering, my question has become less "how could a good God create this?" and more, "how could a good God let this continue?" And I hear the argument from others and from the voices of my early training: "in the end God will wipe every tear from their eyes..." The mentor I met with in January said to me "if God is going to put us through all of this, he damn well better have a good reason." And this mentor believes he does... but how can I trust this? How can I trust that some future event will make it all this horror right?How can I engender enough faith in God not to be paralyzed in my not knowing?

I remembered Jesus. Ah yes, Jesus is supposed to be my promise. God incarnate. But (cover your kids' eyes because this is a dozy), do I believe in Jesus? And I'm brought back to that annoying question of belief. What on earth is belief??? Sure I guess I “believe” in Jesus, but I also believe in Napoleon and the industrial revolution. What does that mean? What does it matter if a bit of history was written down and I choose to say “I guess that is probably true.” Not enough to build my life on.

Call me a raging post-modern, but for me, it has come down to experience. Though in my daily functioning I know I rely on all kinds of knowledge and “beliefs,” when I stop to think about the things I “know,” they are only what I experience. Actually experience in the present. (And, yes, for all you commitedly philosophical types, I recognize that I could be a butterfly dreaming I am a human, but I choose to disregard this level of abstraction. Call me shallow, but if I am a dreaming butterfly [by golly, this is beside the point, but wouldn't that be an interesting plot twist?], I'm going to try and make it a worthwhile dream.)

So, to try to tie a bow on all this randomness, here is my conclusion.

My present experience of love is the answer. The amazing continued existence of love is, I think, the only promise I'll ever get; it is my hope. Because love is, I have hope that the things I do matter. Because love is, I have hope that this God whom I cannot comprehend in his relationship to this tortured world, will make it right eventually. Because love is, I can have some faith that God represented himself in a man to show us who he is, namely, Love.

Everyone is beautiful not because we are all supposed to have spouses to adore us and be the receipiants of this gift, but because Love creates beauty, and because despite an unbelievable history of evil and destruction, somehow, love still is. Love has not been destroyed. Though I can not now say that I think love is winning if there is some kind of battle going on in this world, I cannot deny that it is, Love is, through storms of deafening hate, somehow it has never been lost. Love remains.

With this mustard seed of faith and hope, I will keep getting up each day, struggling for the only thing that matters, and perhaps the only thing that really is. The only hope and expectation that I'll hold for myself and every member of this broken world is that love was, love is, and love - so it seems - will ever be.