What is love? (I
bet remnants of the scene “A Night at the Roxbury” with Will Ferrell and Chris
Kattan shaking their heads to the sounds of Haddaway’s one hit wonder are reverberating
through your brain: “What is love/ Oh baby, don't hurt me/Don't hurt me no more…”)
It’s funny how such a pop-culture piece can actually bring human vulnerability
to the surface and how the genuine correlation of love and hurt are so often
connected. I once heard the best definition and most appropriate explanation of
love put in the simplest terms I had ever heard: Love is sacrifice. If love is
sacrifice, then what exactly is sacrifice? According to common dictionary
definitions, sacrifice is as follows: giving up of something valued: a giving
up of something valuable or important for somebody or something else considered
to be of more value or importance. With this sacrificial definition being
established, it is apparent that the synonymous definition of love is basically
putting someone else before your needs and your immediate egocentric wants..
For love to thrive, to grow, to blossom, and to be healthy, sacrificial
behavior must be established by both parties; it is a constant give and take
environment in which both factions need to put aside selfish desires to nourish
the commitments we as humans were created to take part in: relationship.
Recently I have been reading Tim
Keller’s The Reason for God: Belief in an
Age of Skepticism and a portion corresponding to this sacrificial love kept
drawing me back in to read and re-read this author’s views on how love brings
us freedom, loss, and fulfillment all in the same all-encompassing moment. Here
are the powerful words that have brought some enlightenment into my views of
the concepts of love as a whole (I know this post seems daunting, but trust me,
if you read Keller’s views, I believe you will as well begin to think about the
whole sacrificial love concept in a deeper and more progressive manner):
Love,
the Ultimate Freedom, Is More Constraining than We Might Think
What
then is the moral-spiritual reality we must acknowledge to thrive? What is the
environment that liberates us if we confine ourselves to it, like water
liberates the fish? Love. Love is the most liberating freedom-loss of all.
One
of the principles of love-either love for a friend or romantic love-is that you
have to lose independence to gain greater intimacy. If you want the “freedom”
of love-the fulfillment, security, sense of worth that it brings-you must limit
your freedom in many ways. You cannot
enter a deep relationship and still make unilateral decisions or allow your
friend or love no say in how you live your life. To experience the joy and
freedom of love, you must give up your personal autonomy. The French
novelist Francoise Sagon expressed this well in an interview with Le Monde. She expressed that she was
satisfied with the way she lived her life and had no regrets:
Interviewer: Then you have had the freedom you wanted?
Sagon: Yes…I was obviously less free when I was in
love with someone…But one’s not in love all the time. Apart from that…I’m free.
Sagon is right. A love relationship
limits your personal options. Again we are confronted with the complexity of
the concept of “freedom.” Human beings are most free and alive in relationships
of love. We only become ourselves in love, and yet healthy love relationships
involve mutual, unselfish service, a mutual loss of independence. C.S. Lewis
put it eloquently:
Love
anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you
want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not
even to an animal. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries;
avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your
selfishness. But in that casket-safe, dark, motionless, airless-it will change.
It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.
Freedom, then, is
not the absence of limitations and constraints but it is finding the right
ones, those that fit our nature and liberate us.
For a love relationship to be
healthy there must be a mutual loss of independence. It can’t just be one way.
Both sides must say to the other, “I will adjust to you. I will change for you.
I will serve you even though it means a sacrifice for me.” If only one party
does all the sacrificing and giving, and the other does all the ordering and
taking, the relationship will be exploitative and will oppress and distort the
lives of both people.
At first sight, then, a relationship
with God seems inherently dehumanizing. Surely it will have to be “one way,” God’s
way. God, the divine being, has all the power. I must adjust to God-there is no
way that God could adjust to and serve me.
While this may true in other
religions and belief in God, it is not true in Christianity. In the most
radical way, God has adjusted to us-in his incarnation and atonement. In Jesus
Christ he became a limited human being, vulnerable to suffering and death. On
the cross, he submitted to our condition-as sinners-and died in our place to
forgive us. In the most profound way, God has said to us, in Christ, “I will
adjust to you. I will change for you. I’ll serve you though it means a
sacrifice for me.” If he has done this for us, we can and should say the same
to God and others. St. Paul writes, “the love of Christ constrains us” (2 Corinthians 5:14).
A friend of C.S. Lewis’s once asked
"Is it easy to love God?” and he replied, “It is easy to those who do it.”
That is not as paradoxical as it sounds. When you fall deeply in love, you want
to please the beloved. You don’t wait for the person to ask you to do something
for her. You eagerly research and learn every little thing that brings her
pleasure. Then you get it for her, even if it costs you money or great inconvenience.
“Your wish is my command,”-and it doesn’t feel oppressive at all.
From the outside, bemused friends may think, “She’s leading him around by the
nose,” but from the inside it feels like heaven.
For a Christian, it’s the same with
Jesus. The love of Christ constrains. Once you realize how Jesus changed for
you and gave himself for you, you aren’t afraid of giving up your freedom and
therefore finding your freedom in him. (Keller, Timothy J.
"Christianity Is a Straitjacket." The Reason for God: Belief in an
Age of Skepticism. New York: Dutton, 2008. 48-51.).
What exactly have I taken from these words associated to the love
relationships? I believe we as humans were created for relationships;
relationships that may cause hurt and pain, but without these moments we would
not take the lessons of life that enable us to love harder, to love better, and
to love deeper. If we did not love, we would not experience life the way we
were meant to: to experience the fulfillment of putting someone else ahead of
ourselves. In fact, we have the perfect and most beautiful model of love
through Christ; a loving God who gave up his son in order that we may live life
to the fullest. Furthermore, I once heard a pastor make the statement of how he
would often take the go-to wedding verse of 1 Corinthians 13 and put his name
in the spaces where the word “love” is located: "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres." It is my desire to exude, portray, and embrace these
qualities; it is my craving to be patient, show kindness, stay calm, look for
the interests of others before my own, forgive, stand for justice, protect
those people and things that need protection, have a heart of trust, be full of
hope no matter the situation, and always fight for the faith that so
encompasses this life.
Going
back to the initial question I introduced at the beginning of this post “What
is love?” I believe love is the action of nourishing a relationship and
constantly taking the necessary steps to better another person to better yourself;
my challenge to myself and to others is to put vulnerability to the forefront
and allow yourself to love those around you in order to live life to a more
complete and gratifying level than ever thought possible.
