Over the years, I collected quite a few movie posters, but I only have one left. It sits in my home office: the original poster from Chasing Amy that my friend, Binky brought back on a plane from a trip out to LA while we were in college. I like that it has a few creases in it. It is a dramatic close up of the title character played by Joey Lauren Adams and has the unforgettable tagline:

It’s not who
you love,

it’s how.

Toward the bottom it says “Finally, a comedy that tells it like it feels.” The poster bewitched me from the first moment I saw it at Studio 28 in Grand Rapids and was eager to watch the new movie by my favorite director at the time (after the Coen brothers, of course). The film itself is a simple tragicomedy about a man who falls for a lesbian. The film, of course, takes many twists, but focuses squarely on what the one emotion we call love does to us and how we act because of it. Perhaps more, what we are willing to do to feel that love.

After some careful thought, I’ve decided that I will move this poster again, and that it will come join me at my next “work office”. Part of it is just the drama of the poster itself—her mesmerizing eyes just break you down—but there’s a bigger reason. That tagline:

It’s not who
you love,

It’s how.

This, of course was a particularly big deal in the late 90’s when any conversation about homosexuality split the population into camps, just by shear notion of it. It is still contentious, but it isn’t the same. I think the lessons from the film are still relevant: willingness to risk on love, interest in the person rather than the type, seeking to overcome social taboos on account of love—what is more deeply human than these?

And what is more Christian than to focus less on the “who” than the “how”?

The film’s director, Kevin Smith, is a noted Roman Catholic. His next film, Dogma, which lampoons the seriousness of Catholicism, while maintaining a pretty orthodox view of the faith, raised the hackles of evangelicals more than it did Roman Catholics in 2000. But it is Chasing Amy that seems most relevant to Smith’s Catholicism. He argues that love isn’t about rules, but about the fidelity of intimacy and the willingness of humans to give true respect to one another. In fact, it is when Ben Affleck’s character betrays that fidelity because of his desire that everything falls apart.

It has been years since I’ve seen the movie, and its cherished spot in my top 3 favorite movies has long disappeared, and yet that poster stays with me, reminding me. Love isn’t some random emotion, or some Christian slogan, but an active reflection, embodied in the way we treat one another. Forget the dogmas of faith; it is nothing if we don’t love how we are meant to love.