Can Love Be Saved? Some Thoughts On The World Today

Happy Valentine’s Day! I recently published a post on Patreon called Can Love Be Saved? which might be an interesting post to read today. Patreon is a membership website, so normally anything published there is behind a paywall. But this particular post I decided, after publishing it, that I wanted to make it available to everyone, so for it I removed the paywall. I would have re-posted it here, word for word, here, but the powers that be at Patheos don’t like it when their bloggers re-publish articles that have already published elsewhere on the Internet. Here’s a 500 word excerpt from the post. To read the entire post, click on the following link. It’s a meditation on the political climate that we find ourselves in, at this moment in history.

Here’s the link to the entire essay: www.patreon.com/posts/can-love-be-121730788

In 1960, C. S. Lewis published a book called The Four Loves, based on several different Greek words for love; in it he explores empathy, friendship, eros, and generous self-giving love (in the Greek, agápē) to explain how love is like light: we can refract light into all the colors of the rainbow, and in a similar way, love can be refracted into different dimensions of kindness, compassion and care. Agápē represents the love of God, the love that is God. But it seems to me that in our public intellectual life, we have lost sight of the many nuances of (and in) love, and perhaps this loss has made our society the poorer.

For you see, I’ve noticed a rather distressing trend in the almost 20 years that I have been a contemplative writer and retreat leader. Early on in my work, people always seemed to appreciate this idea that another name for God is “Love.” Indeed, I got into the habit of describing God as “Love-with-a-capital-L” or perhaps “Love-with-a-face.”

Generally speaking, people seemed to accept and even love this. For Christians, it was simply a restatement of the fourth chapter of the first letter of John, which bluntly states “God is love” — the only time in the entire Bible when God is specifically defined. The Bible never says “God is male” or “God is almighty” or “God is judgmental” (thank heaven), but it does say God is love. And the love that John links to God is agápē love: Theos agapé estin (Θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν), “God is love.”

Even for people who do not identify as Christians, equating love with God often seems to make sense: for they might not have faith in God, but they generally did seem to put faith in love.

Ah, but what a difference a decade or so can make.

I don’t remember the first time I noticed somebody pushing back on me about my use of the word “Love.” It was before the pandemic, but not long before: so sometime after 2015. I was flummoxed. The person said something to the effect of, “But what is love?” A fair enough question, and I patiently explained that I wasn’t talking about superficial romance, or the confusion of affection and eroticism, but rather that I understood love in a spiritual sense to refer to infinite compassion, mercy and care. The person seemed to accept my answer but it was clear that he didn’t much care for the word love. I found this rather unsettling, but at the time I chalked it up to one individual’s quirkiness. After all, maybe he had never experienced real love, so no wonder he wasn’t comfortable with the word.

I wish I could say that was an isolated incident, but unfortunately it has happened several more times over years that followed. Thankfully, it’s still not the norm: it seems that most people who are interested in contemplative and mystical writing and retreats have a sense of love as a spiritually meaningful and positive concept — but the pushback against love has happened often enough that I have begun to worry: are we, as a culture, beginning to lose our faith not only in God but even in love?