“Owe no one anything, except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery; you shall not murder; you shall not steal; you shall not covet,’ and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
Romans 13:8-9, NRSVUE
There's Always Love After Romans 13:8-14 These sore shoulders worn out and also, strangely, and importantly, alive but stiff. How many times have you sought relief? To do better? How many times have you put on those heavy coat-like words: Ought. Should. Must. I can see now the fatigue— I feel it more. And then there's always love. It's always a possibility. Love might mean messaging that tough knot from yesterday— yes, that one. Do you want to be excellent? Do you want to become a saint? Love is the willingness to change.
—
The Bible seems to be constantly asking the questions: How do we become part of the flow of God? What is it that God is infusing into our world and experience? What will vanquish the decay and misery of our lives?
The answer? It’s not by being better at adhering to religious practices—though that might happen. It’s love. Rabbi Shai Held, after releasing his book, Judaism is About Love, received pushback from some saying the title sounded too Christian! But Rabbi Held argues that the center of the Hebrew Scriptures is a God of love.
But so often, our faith communities don’t talk about this. They don’t remind us about love being the pathos of God because, well, haven’t we already heard that before? Did it work? Will it really work if we try it again—or should we just try to be a pretty good person so we go to heaven?
I think God is compassionately concerned about our attention and worries about what happens after we die. God is probably thinking, “They’ve missed the point.” Duty, obligation, a kind act here and there—that makes the world go around, but what about going forward? Love moves us forward.1
I think saints are the ones who move us forward.
“The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.”
-Léon Bloy
Often, the best solutions are the ones that have been available all along. We’ve just stopped paying attention.
We look at Jesus, and we think, “Jesus, it’s great that you love, but I’m going to work at this from a different angle, because I probably know better.” We don’t actually say that, but that’s what it looks like from the outside.
My favorite definition of love? M. Scott Peck’s from The Road Less Traveled, whose definition I encountered in bell hooks's All About Love: New Visions.
“Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
Spiritual growth is used in a holistic sense in this definition as a progressive process of becoming more aware, responsible, mature, truthful, and loving.
We are afraid to love because we are worried about what will happen when we do and how tangled and costly life will become. Spoiler alert: it will. And in the midst of feeling so confounded, we will also feel full. Love is like standing in a spring from which living water flows. We will be transformed.
Mary Oliver says the same thing about working artists and creative work: “Those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to make the world go around, but forward.” See her essay Of Power and Time. I see a connection between her ideas about the “third self” in that essay and the impetus of sainthood, because both saints and artists are concerned with extending one’s self for purposes of nurturing spiritual growth.