“The power of love is a curious thing. Makes a
strong man weep, makes another man sing. Turns a hawk to a little white dove.
More than a feeling—that’s the power of love.” Huey Lewis sang these words,
echoing the sentiments of Paul, John, George and Ringo: “All you need is love…
love is all you need.” A myriad of other songwriters and philosophers have
likewise made a virtual religion out of this thing called “love.”
Maybe we hate to admit it, but trying to reduce all
the facets and goals of our world down to a single essence—even love—can be a risky thing. The danger
that all philosophers down through history have faced is the fallacy of reductionism. We all might hope and pray
for a simple, easy answer to the problems and complexities of life, and many
claim to have found one. But such a claim can render the philosopher blind to
the factors that fail to fit into that simple system.
All of us long after this thing we call love; it is
truly a universal human goal. But a longing, if it is strong enough, can cause
a kind of blindness—even a kind of madness.
Take a deep and prolonged thirst for water. If a man is thirsty enough, for long
enough, he might lose his reason. He might begin seeing mirages in the desert.
Or if he’s adrift on the ocean, he might begin drinking the salt water all
around him that will only make him thirstier or sicker.
The perfect philosophy, or the perfect religion,
would account for all the particulars
of our existence—not just the ones that give us feelings of euphoria or satisfy
our longings. The person who says “I simply have love as my religion” has,
perhaps unknowingly, made love more than
it is, and religion less than it is.
Let’s begin with the term “love” itself. Left to
itself, this word is a chameleon, colored by a person’s upbringing, exposure to
culture, history, literature and so on. Does the love devotee limit this virtue
to other people, or does she include animals, plants and inanimate things? How
is love to be shaded and distributed, from “I love this TV program,” to “I love
my cat,” to “I love my brother, my buddy, my spouse…?”
What about loving mankind? One’s country? One’s
enemy? Does one’s love of large groups of people take precedence over loving
one’s own family or one’s close neighbors or one’s countrymen? The mere word
“love” cannot, when left in isolation from values like justice, mercy,
devotion, forgiveness, humility, authority, truth, give us sufficient answers
to these questions. This is why I suggest that “love” is too small a term to
sum up anyone’s view of reality.
Now let’s move on to “religion.” As I understand the
term in its purest form, it differs from “philosophy” in that it moves beyond
intellectual, rational principles about reality, into the realm of devotion and
reverence toward an ultimate or supreme reality. A religion normally claims answers
not only for the “here and now” but also of the “before and hereafter”…eternal
answers. It claims to give satisfactory answers to universal questions of
origins, purpose, and destiny.
In effect, the one who claims that “Love is my
religion” would have to be saying that the simple term “love” is the universal
answer to all of mankind’s questions: “Why and how did we originate? If God
exists, what does He want from us? What are we doing here? Is there any meaning
to life, to morality, to our labors, hopes and dreams? Is there life after
death? How will it all end? Do we have any say in our future destiny?”
Obviously, “religion” is too large a term for the word “love” to stand alone as
a satisfactory answer to its questions.
Perhaps the love-religionist would wish to modify
his claim to: “All I believe in is a loving God,” or “Love is my God.” Indeed,
there would seem to be some Bible verses that point to love as being synonymous
with the Deity: John the Apostle writes that “he who does not love does not know
God, because God is love.” Here we must take care not to jump to unwarranted
conclusions. One may say “This chicken is our dinner,” for example, without
saying that the chicken and the meal are synonyms for the same thing. There are
parts of the animal that are
decidedly not being served as food,
and there are parts of the dinner that
are unrelated to the bird in question. John’s point in saying “God is love” is
that God is so much the embodiment of pure love, that no one who fails to love
can claim an intimate relationship to Him. In our reading of the entirety of
Scripture, it is clear that one could also make the statements: “God is
holiness,” “God is joy,” “God is justice,” “God is wrath,” “God is truth,”
etc., since He is the pure embodiment of all of those attributes as well. Those
who claim to have a close bond with Him must also display holiness, joy,
justice and all the rest, for their claim to be true.
How would a love-religionist deal with the
brokenness of our world and the immorality and guilt of our human race? Sadly,
there are broken, unloving and unlovely things and people all around us and, if
we are honest, we find brokenness, hate and ugliness inside our own hearts and
minds. Every human being who ever lived has had to face the fact that this
world and the people in it are not what they ought to be. I might long after
love, cry out for love, want to give love, even come to worship love as my
god…but in my honest heart of hearts, I have to admit two painfully bitter
truths about myself:
I am too selfish and too enslaved by my own desires
to truly love as I ought.
AND
I am in no way deserving of the love I continually
long after.
Only the most delusional person will make the claim
that his or her love (given or received) is everything he or she longed or
meant for it to be. Even the most sincere love we express or experience is
riddled with imperfections like guilt, regret, dishonesty, selfishness, greed,
lust, etc. There is a void that occurs in all human love—a gap that can’t be
filled in with the simplistic old saw, “Nobody’s perfect.” Certainly, an
imperfect love that is cracked and marred cannot occupy any pedestal we would
wish to label “my God.”
This presents the love-worshiper with a “Catch-22”
dilemma. If I were to respond, “Well, of course the world is broken and the
people are unloving; that’s exactly why my devotion to love as the ideal is so
necessary! Love is itself the answer
to that brokenness. If we abandon all the religions out there and simply preach
and demonstrate love, everything would eventually get better…wouldn’t it?”—if
that was my response to a broken world and mankind, I’d be in for a big
letdown. Even if I could convince every person in the world to agree with my
viewpoint and make it everyone’s goal to love each other, all I’d succeed in
doing would be to enlist billions of equally flawed and broken people to engage
in a love equally flawed and broken.
(to be continued...)
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