When I was in Youth With a Mission in Perth, there lived a Canadian family under me. The father was a cheerful and sturdy mechanic with half a thumb missing who played guitar and sang a bit. The chorus of his favourite song went, "What is this thing called love / I know I've found it / It's in your eyes." This line has stuck with me for a long time, as long as I have wondered, what is this thing called love?
1. Corinthians 13 verses 4-8 seem promising when adressing the issue, in that it opens, "Love is..." promising a definition. Instead we are only given a description,
"Love is patient, love is kind.
It does not envy, it does not boast,
it is not proud. It is not rude,
it is not self-seeking,
it is not easily angered,
it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil
but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts,
always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails."
So, for long I was frustrated with this 'answer' and, actually, disappointed with the Bible for its apparent failure in adressing my questions about so central a subject. Now, the following may not seem like much of a revelation to you but it was hugely liberating to me. I'll explain more about that lastly.
The point is that love cannot be captured entirely in words, much like a personality cannot, and thus it can merely be described.
This revelation unified two clichés that seemed before to be contradicting, that love is a choice and that love is a passion (yet another area in which logos and libido are at war). This unification was not as much logically as it was emotionally (/spiritually?) within me.
In any case I felt liberated as my feelings and thoughts had now been formulated into an understandable sentence: I was justified and free to say, "I love you, " knowing what it was meant to convey! [smile]
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I guess that a part of "love" is those things described in the "highsongs"
(Højsangen - aner ikke hvad den hedder på engelsk).
And then, listen to U2's "Desire"! ;-)
Hmm...the question is posed once again, what is love? It is only as a late that I have fully realized that it really is a choice. You cannot make someone love you; which is always disappointing when you come to this conclusion yet again. But when trying to describe it, love is so intangible that we as humans can barely grasp more than just the bare minimum of the concept in itself.
Post a Comment