"Imagine" a Love so Real

As John Lennon’s birthday recently passed, a few articles have floated my way via email. Chuck Colson’s piece wondering if Lennon was an unwitting prophet, while including Beatles titles within his text was a fun read.

Mark Shea, who dislikes the song “Imagine” published a lengthy response to an “Imagine” lover was also interesting and fun.

My own thoughts on “Imagine” are currently up at Patheos, and while I don’t know if they’re fun, I hope you’ll find them interesting – I look at it from the perspective of love, social duty and the greatest deconstruction of all:

Social duty helps to structure society, but is not love. It cannot replace love. But when love has begun to feel theoretical, rather than experiential, social duty can seem like the reasonable facsimile.

It is easy to imagine love; in our imaginations love can be anything we want it to be. The reality of love is much more difficult; it is risky to let in, terrifying to release into the trust and care of others. If we are not learning love from our families, we will not learn it through social deconstruction. Primal scream therapies and blanket-suffocating “rebirthing therapies” — celebrated as breakthrough treatments in the past — did not manage to fix what has been broken.

There is only one effective deconstruction and it is born out of love; it is before our eyes daily, in the Divine Liturgy and the Sacrifice of the Mass, in the Holy Eucharist and the Crucifix, where we see the ultimate Agent of Deconstruction rendering all things, all times, all peoples, all pain, all deceit, all betrayal, all poverty, all shame, all hate to himself, whereupon they were defeated.

The means of victory — his own body — is broken and shared among us, and all things are resurrected, made new, in a love of such depths and surety it cannot be humanly comprehended.

You can read it all here.

Also, don’t miss Pat Gohn, and God, outside the box.