The hardest part about being required to love is not the obligation itself. It’s that we insist on judging each other’s attempts.
Episode 25 of the Make Saints podcast: “Commanded to Love”
the episode script
Each of us understands that we’re supposed to love people. It’s a thing we’re supposed to do. Love is good.
We ascribe high moral character to love. And we recognize that the generous sharing of love is a necessary component of life.
But what does it really mean to require love?
Let’s talk about love, Baby
One of the things we most associate with love is that it is something that we feel.
So I feel a sensation that I call love.
And then, because I feel that sensation, I desire to express that love outward to the object of my affection.
I feel love for you, therefore I express my love for you.
We all naturally understand the core reality of love has these inseparable parts: feeling and action: inside and outside.
Sometimes we desire to separate them.
We can’t really. But we desire to. We long to make the pieces essentially whole in themselves.
So love becomes only the emotion. Action is something else.
And we can play that rhetorical game for a little while and parse the situation out. But we’ll always get stuck because these divisions only exist in the life of the mind. And they breed a kind of distortion within our sense of reality.
Love as an emotion only is insubstantial. It stops being real.
Even as we know the emotions cause real responses in the body (sweat, attentiveness, arousal), the desire to remove its connection from reality has the effect of making it useless, inert, and lifeless.
If love is just an emotion, and emotions aren’t substantial, then it renders the substance of our very existence as nothing.
To love is action.
It is a verb. It is emotion and reaction. It is reactive and proactive. It inspires us to do crazy things and to sacrifice ourselves. Love is intoxicating and utterly fascinating.
Christian scripture also argues that “God is love.”
So this active: proactive and reactive emotion/passion is not only substantial: it is the same substance as God.
So then let’s be real with each other here. It is hard to overstate the importance of love.
Scripture also tells us that we must love.
Now, before our freedom-loving minds feel the need to go all Declaration of Independence on the idea that we have to love, let’s recognize the intention. If God is love and Jesus is like My Dudes, there’s one thing you need to do: love each other, shouldn’t we want to love?
Isn’t the idea that we must love kinda the point?
I get you might be super into rebellion and all that. I hear you. But just consider that this is kind of like saying there’s only one rule and if everyone follows that one rule we don’t need other rules? If everything hangs on this one thing, then maybe we all need to do this one thing…
Of course the rebellious aren’t the real problem. Most of us really do get it. I don’t worry about the people who never accept commands.
The love command inspires a greater danger.
Legalism.
When we’re told to love; when we are commanded to love, what happens? We now have a requirement. Something we have to do. I now have something I can measure my sense of success against. Did I do what I was commanded to do? Yes or no?
What also happens? I get to see whether or not you have done it too. And if I’ve done the love thing and think you haven’t and I feel bold and secure in myself, I just might tell you how not loving you are.
The thing about this is we know that none of this is hypothetical. This is what happens.
One of the saddest and most repeated experiences in my life has been just how often people come to me to tell me how much love they are not receiving. Some of it in the form of spiritual abuse and hate from people commanded to love them. This is always tragic.
I also frequently have people come who are evaluating the church and saying it isn’t loving enough; or not loving in the way they want it to be. And I don’t always know what to do with that assessment.
It is certainly real. But it also lacks a generous spirit.
We aren’t given a blueprint. We don’t have Ikea instructions to build love like a Billy Bookcase. There is no rigidity to this command or specificity to what it truly looks like.
All we know is that it involves sacrifice. Friendship. A sense that we should give as much love to our neighbor as ourselves. But it doesn’t tell us what to do in every single situation.
I’m starting to think that the enemy of love isn’t hate. It is evaluation.
We only develop hate out of a sense of devotion. But when we evaluate, we judge, make claims about others, and disassociate ourselves from the grace they are offering.
One of my favorite podcasts is The Anthropocene Reviewed, by novelist and vlogger John Green. And the premise of his podcast is to parody the “yelpification” of our culture by rating and reviewing our culture.
The podcast is witty and wise and so very elegant.
It is also revealing how reductive and ridiculous our desire to rate and review everything around us truly is. He gave the disease Cholera the podcast’s first 1 star review.
I suspect our obsession with evaluating one another is a symptom of a wicked disease in the culture toward perfectionism and workaholism.
Expecting perfection is an expression of cruelty.
Anyone who has studied perfectionism, both in psychology and creativity knows that it is a nice way of describing cruel reductive thinking that sabotages our work. Perfectionism is what prevents a novelist from writing a follow-up to a masterpiece or prevents a student from performing on stage in front of her peers.
But perfectionism is also what allows a teacher to berate her students or a customer to leave an angry review.
We understand this enough to share the well-traveled phrase: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But I’m not sure we fully internalize what that means throughout our lives.
And I genuinely think that evaluating each other, like each of us is God’s chosen culture critic, is killing us.
The love command is not an invitation to evaluate our neighbors.
Of course I am as guilty as anyone. And there is nuance worth exploring to this. But the purpose is to affirmatively love those around us rather than evaluate the love those around us share.
And as much as it is useful to differentiate one’s sense of love from another’s, to clarify just how your love may differ from their vision of it, we shouldn’t do this as if this critique were actually us showing love.
Love each other. If that’s the point, we really can’t go wrong with keeping that the point. After all, the command is to love, not “rate and review the love of those around you.”
And for me, I’ve found that it starts with loving myself more generously. The de-yelpification of the culture starts with me. And my willingness to even love myself.