The eCrozier

We use the word “love” to describe our relationship to many things – everything from ice cream to a car to another human being. But can we really love a thing? Does love require another living being as the subject of our love? These are the questions that Spike Jonze explores in his recent movie, Her, where a man falls in love with a Siri-like computer intelligence. There’s a pathetic quality to this where the filmgoer has to wonder whether the character is at all capable of having a loving, human relationship, or can he only love that which is programmed to cater to his proclivities, whims, and desires?

Love has often been defined as something we fall into. Once cupid’s arrow gets us, we’re goners. And since love is something we fall into, we assume that there’s nothing we can do about it. After all, the image of falling is an image of being out of control. There’s some truth in this. Love isn’t simply a matter of rational will that can be reduced to a rational choice. Love is full of emotion with wildly dancing neurons in our subconscious. In order for it to be powerful and true, love has to have an irrational quality to it. Few would actually choose to love if it were reduced to only a rational choice. But if love is going to last, it has to be more than the falling variety, because if love is only something we fall into, then we just as easily can fall out of love. No effort needed. All we have to do is fall. Lasting love is holistic. It requires our emotions and passions, but it also necessitates our intellects and wills.

The way our culture has come to define love shortchanges the Gospel definition embodied by Jesus, the kind that can’t be summed up by a cute verse on a Hallmark card or incarnated in a box of chocolates. Jesus shows us that while love does involve our passions, it also has to be an act of will on our part. We must decide that come what may, cost what it will, we’re going to love the other. When we reduce love to only our sentiments and feelings, then it will only be superficial and fleeting. Such fleeting superficiality does often generate passion, but it can never generate lasting love.

Love becomes the kind of love embodied by Jesus only when it’s put it into action. As long as we accept the cultural definition of love that limits it to falling, then we won’t see any reason to make love tangible in the sharing and sacrificial way Jesus has shown us. So much of human love is wrapped up in our misguided need for dominating power and total control as well as our selfish desire for complete affection and undivided attention. Of course, love can be much more healthy and whole than that, and thus truer to the heart of Christ, but so often it isn’t, sin being what sin is with our messy humanity.

In looking at Jesus for a definition of love, we must be careful not to put our own definition of love on his lips or try to define love apart from Jesus’ cross; for it’s the cross that defines love for Christians. Jesus says: “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another” (John 13:34b). He doesn’t say: “Do as I say, not as I do,” rather he completes the circle by saying that we are to love as he loves us. That leads St Paul to say: “Love does not insist on its own way…It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13)

+Scott