Tough Love Extended

Love’s as warm as tears,
love is tears:
pressure within the brain,
tension at the throat,
deluge, weeks of rain,
haystacks afloat,
featureless seas between
hedges, where once was green.

Love’s as fierce as fire,
love is fire:
all sorts—infernal heat
clinkered with greed and pride,
lyric desires, sharp-sweet,
laughing, even when denied
and that empyreal flame
whence all loves came.

Love’s as fresh as spring,
love is spring:
bird-song hung in the air,
cool smells in a wood,
whispering “Dare! Dare!”
to sap, to blood,
telling “Ease, safety, rest,
are good; not best”.

Love’s as hard as nails,
love is nails:
blunt, thick, hammered through
the medial nerves of One
who, having made us, knew
that thing He had done,
seeing (with all that is)
our cross, and His.

You know, sometimes I think that the four letter word that should really be banned from the English language is LOVE. It gets in the way of so much. It gets used in so many different and so many inappropriate ways. It’s a wonder it still persists. You think we’d have given up long ago.

The word “love” is used in the most wishy-washy fuzzy way that it loses all its meaning: “I love chocolate.” “I love that outfit you’ve got on.”

It’s used so lightly that some people find it possible to profess their undying love for someone even as they are sticking the proverbial knife in that person’s back: “You know I love you and it’s for your own good!”

It’s used to humiliate others as greater and greater demands are made in its name: “If you loved me, you would…”

It’s used to force people to stay in physically and emotionally violent situations and to prevent them from protecting themselves: “But I love him, he doesn’t mean it.” “If you loved her, you’d stay.”

And it’s used to justify the breaking up of stable families: “I’m just not in love with you anymore.” “I’m in love with someone else.”

The word “love” is used to justify, manipulate and perpetuate some of the most painful, useless, exploitative and even horrific acts which the human race has ever managed to perpetrate. It all sounds a bit too much like a B-grade soap opera. There seems good reason for banning it.

And yet in the midst of all this we dare to say: “God is love.” We dare to hear Jesus' commandment: “Love one another as I have loved you.” We dare to read passages of scripture such as we have heard today. And we dare to believe that we understand at least a little of what this thing called love is all about. We dare to make commitments to each other which are said to be based in love. We dare to sign at the bottom of Birthday and Christmas and Fathers' and Mothers' Day cards, "Lots of Love from". We dare...

The movie, Places in the Heart, begins with a family scene. The father, a strict disciplinarian, heads the table at the traditional Sunday roast dinner. It's the southern United States in about the mid 1930's, the middle of the Great Depression. The mother bustles with the dinner endeavouring to make sure that things are just to her husband's required taste and pleasure. She seems timid and uncertain in the expectations placed upon her to be perfect mother and wife at least in the understandings of those times. Two children are kept in line by their mother's cajoling and their father's reprimands.

Then there's a knock at the door and the father, who is the local sheriff, is called away to deal with a drunken black American adolescent male in possession of a firearm. While attending to this matter, the father is accidently shot by the adolescent.

In a scene of chaos, the lifeless body of the sheriff is unceremoniously delivered to the kitchen table where the family had just been eating their dinner. Unable to cope with their own grief and this unexpected death, the deliverers come and go without so much as a word of explanation to his distressed widow. They leave to join a mob to lynch and drag to death the offender, the only answer they have for their grief.

As the film unfolds, the mixture of good and bad, of sin and sainthood, is played out before the viewers' eyes. A man and a woman are unfaithful to their respective partners but ultimately remain loyal to the one to whom they made their initial marriage commitment. The grieving widow is befriended by a black American who helps her to retain her financial independence by managing her cotton crop. Friends of her husband who purport to offer support to her in her time of crisis turn out to be members of the Ku Klux Klan who ultimately beat up and run her black American friend out of town. A tornado occurs and the old woman who lives in her car is killed even as she offers shelter to a child. The good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly of human life are all paraded before the watchers' eyes in this cameo of the life of that southern American town.

It all seems rather pointless. Life and death, fidelity and infidelity, pride, prejudice and compassion placed uneasily side by side without comment for the viewer to watch. And then, almost as a by the way, the filmmaker surreptitiously adds to the end of the film another family scene. And somehow, just by that one addition the whole of the film, the whole of life, the whole of humanity seems to make sense.

Yet the scene is not one that could actually have taken place physically. Its membership includes living and dead, saint and sinner and all those in between. It is another meal, a visionary and prophetic meal, another family meal and the guests are the family of the whole community in that place. There are black Americans and Ku Klux Klan members, husbands and wives, parents and children, the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, every member of the community who remain in this small town and in their community despite its apparent inadequacies and difficulties. But this meal is possible because this meal is a special meal. The setting is a church and the table is the table of the Lord. All those people are seated in the church, in the congregation, side by side at the table of the Lord. All of them despite themselves and their inadequacies, loved and cared for by a presence which transcends the lives which they lead and the humanity which is theirs. All those people finding for themselves a place in the heart of God. All those people, God's beloved children despite themselves. Such is the love of our God.

In the time described by Acts, it was similar. There were Jews and Greeks. Those who thought certain laws were important and those who didn't. Those who would eat meat offered to idols and those who wouldn't. Those who backed Peter and those who backed Paul. Those who saw the reign of Christ as bringing new social freedom to all people including Gentiles, woman and slave. And those who didn't. There too, the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly of humankind in all its various shades of grey existed. There too they lived and worked side by side and there too the invitation remained the same.

It was an invitation intended to be extended and preached to all. It was an invitation intended to extend beyond the barriers of class and race and sex. It was an invitation extended to people in their humanity not in the impossibility of their ability to be perfect. There too, God's spirit was working bringing about community despite the failures and inadequacies of the people. There too, people were discovering that all people, Jews and Gentile, men and women, slave and free were loved and cared for. There too, people were discovering that each of them could find for themselves a place in the heart of God as God's beloved children. Such is the love of our God.

And this is the claim that we make today too. That God’s love is a love that embraces us all. And that’s the kind of love we dare to proclaim, we dare to practice, we dare to preach.

But that kind of love isn’t very popular. It threatens people's worldview and people's power-bases. And the kind of obedience in love which Jesus demands leads to real and painful consequences. Jesus' commandment is not given lightly, nor is it an easy one. It demands deep commitment and plenty of endurance. It is given because for Jesus we are not servants but friends, companions on the hard road on which he travelled and still travels with us.

I have a very old poster with a picture of a much-loved and much-worn Teddy Bear seated in an old wooden chair. There are places where the bear’s seams have needed to be re-done and they have been done by hand in big child-like stitches. There are places where the stuffing protrudes through these repairs. The material is worn. It no longer carries all its fur. The bear only has one button eye left; and in the space where the other should be there is more stitching… in the shape of a cross. The caption says:

Learn to listen like a Teddy Bear
With ears open and mouth closed tight.
Learn to forgive like a Teddy Bear
With heart open, not caring who is right.
Learn to love like a Teddy Bear
With arms open and imperfect eyesight.

For me, this poster captures something of the kind of love that Jesus enacts. It is a love that brings with it hard decisions and hard actions that leave us worn-out and wounded in places. It's not the kind of love that leaves you with a feeling of self-satisfaction but more often with the recognition that although you have loved as much as you are able, there is still room for more love to be given and received. It's the kind of love that lead Kahlil Gibran to write in this book The Prophet: “For even as love crowns you so shall love crucify you.” And to C.S. Lewis writing:

Love’s as hard as nails,
love is nails:
blunt, thick, hammered through
the medial nerves of One
who, having made us, knew
that thing He had done,
seeing (with all that is)
our cross, and His.