From the Rector
Dear Friends in Christ,
“A Case for Love” is a new movie that features our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, along with other public figures, actors, theologians, and writers. It will be shown in movie theaters nationwide on only one day: Tuesday, January 23. Lots of theaters in Tucson will offer it at various times.
The film begins with a simple enough premise: love inspires ordinary people to do extraordinary things. The movie highlights the stories of people of faith who have had their lives changed and changed the lives of others through the love of Jesus Christ. It challenges each of us to look for ways to practice, however simply, acts of unselfish love.
That encouragement comes with some structure and accountability though. The film gives a framework for undertaking a real practice, a discipline, of unselfish love and both acting and reflecting with intention. It asks us to create habits of love that help us share the love of God with others and know that love more deeply ourselves.
One of the challenges of the English language is that love is an imperfect word. We can talk of loving a book, or cream cheese, or a flan just as we can talk of loving God or our neighbor. We don’t have a proper sense of scale!
The good news about that is, however, that we also don’t get to express downward gradations very precisely either. We don’t have a word for a grudging love of our enemy. We don’t have a word for a reluctant love of someone we need to forgive. We don’t have a word for that mix of love and envy we have for that sibling who has it all.
English simply gives us love as the functional word. Which is what God gives us, too, as our functional way of being. We are challenged to love one another with a capacious equanimity that has room for all—no matter our desire to offer a kind of economy class, outlet version of the love God calls us to.
English, and God, kind of force us to upgrade love even when a downgrade is what we’d most like to offer. So yes, we have that imprecision where we might over-love a comestible or consumable. But we also have an imprecision by which we love just rightly—where the word we use for loving our enemy is the same word we use for how God loves us. The imprecision is a perpetual reminder of the dissonance, the gap, between the love God shows and the love we show.
If we had a different word for God’s love and for ours it might give us a way to opt out of higher forms of love. It might give us a grammatical excuse to let ourselves off the hook for a disciplined engagement with our fears, hurts, anxieties, anger, and more that keep us from living into the full measure and stature of the word.
There are so many ways to show love. It might be a simple act like baking cookies for someone who is ill. It might be a card or note or an email. It might be something more. It might look like selfless care of someone with a selfish disease that’s robbing you of the future you dreamed of once. It might be, again and again, welcoming home the child who never treats it like home. It might be forgiveness, mercy, charity, or compassion. It might be a firm push for someone whose potential is being wasted.
Love takes on many forms. But we are always being called to its highest form. For us Christians, that highest form is Christ. We are always being called to a deeper knowledge of him, a deeper immersion in his life and teaching, so that we become soaked through with his love. That’s the nature of baptized life. Ultimately it is being soaked in Christ so we can teach others to swim. And we do it for that most imprecise of reasons: for love.
So while we might lament the sloppiness of our language—that we can’t quite precisely name the gradation of love we’re trying to express—we can be grateful that God doesn’t use those gradations either. He loves us. Full stop. He calls us to love. Full stop. And for that we can only give thanks, not only with our lips but with our lives, giving up ourselves to his service, and by walking in his ways and heeding his call for all the days we are given.
Yours in Christ’s Love,
—Fr Robert