The Gravity of Love
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind… and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”
Matt 22.37-9
I seem to be going to a lot of my friends’ 50th Birthday parties recently, which is odd since most of them are as young as I am. They had even found some hula hoops at one of these dos. Although that sexy gyrating of our early teens had lost its allure when now, in some cases, the hoop would scarcely fit over their hips.
And of course it is de rigeur at these parties to play music from the 60s when we were groovy teenagers in our flares and paisley shirts.
So I found myself for days after a recent birthday bash singing that Beatles classic: “All you need is love.”
It was a nice idea, but it lacked content and context. It could include everything and nothing. As Charlie Brown so famously put it: “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand!”
“All you need is love” is both similar to and yet very different from Augustine’s aphorism: “Dilige et quod vis fac” (Epist. Joann. Tractatus vii.8) “Love and do what you want.”
The context of this statement is not the fluffy, feely factor. It is the gravity of God’s love reflected in response by us: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind… and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”
Our Lord says that at the heart of our Christian discipleship is the stark truth: ‘Love God and love your neighbour.’
So what do these two great Judaeo-Christian commandments mean?
Loving God with all our heart. We’re not very good at fervour and enthusiasm. I remember at a recent Labour Party Conference service, one of the Salvation Army Songsters shouted ‘Hallelujah’ at the end of a rousing rendition of ‘Thine be the glory’.
People smiled nervously, hoping there would be no more displays of public emotion. The Prime Minister’s security men were visibly alarmed. If there was somebody here so obviously out of control that he could shout ‘Hallelujah’, then there might be somebody here who could shoot the PM. (Which is about the only thing that would get some of you shouting ‘Hallelujah’...)
The very word ‘enthusiasm’ was originally an insult, meaning ‘possessed by a god’.
The church has usually expelled the lovers of God who display too much emotional zeal for the faith. Like Luther and Wesley. Or with others, like Francis of Assisis, the church contains them within a religious order where they can’t do too much damage.
On it’s own, emotional love without content and depth produces simply sentimentality. God falls into the same category as puppy dogs, old church buildings and Cliff Richard. And this is not enough.
So we must love God with all our soul.
“Out of the depths my soul cries out to you” says the psalmist. De profundis. Profound love of God can come out of those experiences of life which furrow deep into our psyche, into our very being: extreme pain, or mental anguish; inconsolable grief. What CS Lewis called ‘God’s megaphone’.
But also existential moments of bliss; the unbearable lightness of ‘being’; the palpable pain of overwhelming beauty; the moments of supreme well-being often flowing from human love and affection: the weight, the gravity of love.
However, deep love, that never looks outward, produces introspection and self-absorption. It can even induce pride and a sense of superiority. It is one of the peculiar dangers of the religious life; those in convents and monasteries who sometimes spend too much time plumbing the depths.
On its own, like emotional love, profound love of God is not enough.
So we must love God with all our mind. Some of us are more at home here. We enjoy discussions about the existence of God and the finer points of doctrine. Although as Lady Bracknell puts it in The Importance of Being Earnest, it is not quite respectable in polite society to be too intelligent. Perhaps Britain is the only country in Europe where the expression “too clever by half” is an insult.
I am alarmed sometimes when talking with students to find that their understanding of Christian theology has not gone much beyond their understanding of Father Christmas and the Teletubbies.
Indeed some of them have a better grasp of the underlying theological position of the Simpsons than the Christian grounding that undergirds most of Western European thought and culture. There’s nothing wrong in getting intellectual about our love of God.
But loving God as an academic idea without emotion or depth simply produces a sterile formula, devoid of spiritual power. On its own it is not enough.
Plato did great damage to the development of Christian thought by his splitting of the human into two parts - body and spirit. For the Jews at the time of Christ, any one of these three things - heart, soul, mind - would have sufficed to indicate the whole person. There was no division or tripartite, or dualist view of humans as body and spirit.
The command was to love God with our whole being: the affective, reflective and intellective; heart, soul and mind; strong love with checks and balances.
If we love God in this way, then we cannot but help love our neighbour as ourselves. This is the second commandment, inextricably linked with the first. And it is not an easy command to keep.
GK Chesterton once remarked that the Bible tells us to love our neighbours and to love our enemies - because they are generally the same people!
This love of God means we will care for the homeless and the refugees; we will protect the weak; we will look out for one another. And we will build societies and churches that do this.
If we do not, then we deceive ourselves, and we do not genuinely love God, with heart and soul and mind. We have some shallow lightweight love which does not reflect the heaviness of God’s love for us.
Soon we come to the altar of God: the passion of Christ. And we remember that we love because he first loved us.
Gravity
The apple, unlike Adam, had no choice but to fall
Speeding to fulfil its creator’s call.
But what force drew him down to us?
He, with a starlit infinity to explore,
He, who could peer into a neutron’s core,
He, who had spoken a thousand million times
And known the sulphuric spit of our self-vaunting crimes
He, whom we had called murderer, liar, thief
And left for dead with enlightened relief.
What force drew him down from above
To reap the grim harvest of rebel pride,
Hammered with nails of truth denied?
What force drew him down from above?
What force but this: the gravity of love.
(Mark Green, November 1994)
