Love and the Consequence of Buzzwords
Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. Matthew 22: 37-39 (NIV)
I try (and often fail) to base my life around loving God and loving others. But what does that even mean? I can spout that idea off pretty easily and get away with it. I can make my heart sound really great with very little effort. Sometimes when I hear the word “love” in conversations about action, it grates on me. “Love” is moving into the category where I have placed other words that have lost their original meaning to me: Evangelical, Christian, conservative, liberal… I’m worried it’s becoming another buzzword. I’m worried it might need a break from me.
If you’re just stumbling upon this blog, I’m currently working on my Master’s in Women’s and Gender Studies. One night I was walking home after a class where we discussed sexism within transgender communities and I all of a sudden realized the complications of the conversation. I was thinking; “How deep does this –ism go? I know how intertwined sexism, racism, and poverty are, and how I am implicated and responsible for them and for fighting them. All too often I think I have all these issues figured out and then something difficult appears and I see a new side.
I work at a housing program for homeless teen mothers and sometimes our whole staff is blind-sided by a situation we didn’t see coming at all. And then it’s gone and we just have to sit and dissect the recent past. How am I in the same setting every day, and then still, it hits me in the face? How do I spend time working against sexism and poverty for a living and still need time to understand it? How deep does this go? Sometimes, when it comes to injustice, I feel like I’m sinking in the deep end of the pool, waiting to hit the bottom and push off, back to the surface. Dramatic, I know. I am very aware.
A friend of mine, who is from the Middle East pointed out last week that in America we have so much access to so much information and we don’t take advantage of it. Instead we rely on stereotypes, second-hand knowledge, and e-mail forwarded quips about very serious issues. She wasn’t being mean or rude, just speaking from her heart and background. It hit me in the gut. She’s right.
I’ve been thinking about what it means to love God with my mind. I think venturing into an ambiguous field of study that is somehow in my heart, is loving God with my mind. I think seriously discussing and researching the implications of categorizing people as “men” and “women” and seeking to re-understand those terms via scripture, at the same time, is loving God with my mind. Being considerate and communal in my learning and unlearning is loving God with my mind. Realizing God is too big for me to manage is loving with my mind.
How deep does this go? How many times do I re-define “love” before I can define it again?
I’m perplexed by the notion that we should just love everyone, because it gives us access to utilizing a blind and untested love. It makes it sound easy and clean. I’m not saying we should not accept everyone, just as they are, I’m saying we need to learn exactly who they are, even if it means getting into conversations that make us uncomfortable. It means allowing the world to get messier than we may think necessary, so other people know that their mess is our mess. I’m pretty sure this is what Christ did. If I just throw a blanket ideology of “just love everyone” out there am I leaving room to learn how specific people have struggled to define themselves? Am I leaving room for and welcoming unrest? Am I paying attention to how the complex, unjust world has treated them? Am I missing out on intimacy in the name of acceptance? Oh wow. How do I just love everyone? Dramatic, I know. I am very aware.
A few weeks ago my friend Kevin passed away. If I brought this conversation up with him he would have told me I was over-thinking things and I should just focus on loving other people instead of worrying about the definition of the word. And I would say that’s what I AM trying to do and we would go back and forth like that. But we would both be right. The last conversation I had with Kevin was through email. I was helping him do research for a paper on No Child Left Behind. Kevin was a 55 year-old man who had no vested interest in education reform except that he wanted what was best for people. When he died he didn’t leave anything on earth except his actions and all these relationships that didn’t make any sense. Kevin and I shouldn’t really have been friends. I don’t run around with a lot of middle-aged, formerly homeless men. But, Kevin and I were friends because we were both really concerned with loving the whole world.
I guess what I’m trying to figure out is how to dive into this mess of a world and also grasp onto truly knowing people. I shouldn’t really walk around fretting about the transgender community, but that’s just what’s happening right now. I don’t understand or feel the same things they might understand and feel. But I want to see how deep this goes. I want to know how intertwined we all are. I want to be someone people can bring their complicated conversations to, even though the deeper I sink, the fewer answers I have. I want to always be really concerned with the whole, indefinable world.
In some ways I am tired of thinking about love. I’m tired of hearing about it. It’s frightening to unpack and it’s kind-of ugly. Maybe that’s part of the problem: we’ve made it really pretty. We’ve made it a buzzword. Trying to figure out how poverty relates to sexism relates to racism relates to God is not attractive. But I think it’s loving with my mind. I’m starting to see a really deep, difficult love here and I’m getting a new handle on it. It’s kind-of unattractive and hard to talk about. But that’s what I am trying to do.
So this is my prayer: that your love will flourish and that you will not only love much but well. Learn to love appropriately. Philippians 1:9 (The Message)
