ROMANCE AND HUMAN LOVES
Jesus didn’t come into the world to deprive us of life. He didn’t come into the world to make us miserable and draw us away from the creation and the joys of it. No, he came to redeem us. I mean by that that he came to save us from our sins, of course! Of course! But the redemption Jesus brings is not only from guilt and the God-appointed judgment that sinful rebellion inevitably leads the impenitent to. He came to redeem us from self-destruction, from ignorance and blindness, from frittering away our lives in empty pursuits and he came to redeem us to truth and light and joy lived out in the world in the glorious presence of God.Without God we’re lost not only in some specialized religious sense—we’re lost to dreams we should dream, relationships we should enjoy and lost to purposes that dignify us as humans. He came to enable us to see life and the world in a new way and to live in response to that vision in a new way. Of course this new and redeemed way is the fulfilment of his old, eternal purpose.
Old things become new, worn out things are refreshed—the entire creation becomes a different place because we see it in and through him and gladly confess that that is how it should be seen if we are to enjoy life to the full in God’s creation.
Everything changes for the person who sees with Christ’s eyes. Oh I don’t mean they become as clear-sighted as Jesus but I do mean that they confess that Jesus’ vision is the true vision and to that degree they “re-envision” the world. It’s never the same after Him. The deeper their relationship with him the better they see things because they see them Jesus’ way. If any person is in Jesus he/she is part of a “new creation”; they don’t judge life and the people around them in the same way and the joys of life become more joyful. A poet said it like this:
Heaven above is softer blue
Earth beneath is sweeter green
Something lives in every hue
That Christless eyes have never seen
Birds with gladder songs overflow
Stars with deeper beauty shine
Since I know as now I know
I am his and he is mine.
Our vision, whatever its source and shape, shapes the world for us and if love of the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ is the central impulse it shapes the world accordingly. Love in the form of “romance” or “friendship” or “family” illustrates this perfectly. It’s true that “romance” can be a cheap and shallow and irresponsible thing, but it need not be. Maybe in our Western society it’s mainly those things but, again, it need not be and it’s surely a mistake to take the weakest and worst forms of it and make them the norm.
The musician who butchers Beethoven or Bach doesn’t reflect badly on the composers—he humbles himself and those who know the richness of the music roll their eyes, maybe in pain. Those who speak of friendship and merely use those they call friends mustn’t be taken as illustrating friendship. Professing Christians who devour all round them and bring shame on the very name of Jesus shouldn’t be used as examples of Christ’s followers and abusive, sadistic parents can hardly be thought of as an example of the essence of parenthood.
Many young people—it’s everywhere lamented—are leaving religion behind or going to religions that give them a buzz. Who can know how many reasons there are for this? I’m certain that one of them is that we’ve separated religion from life and reduced living—real living—to religious behavior within religious structures and people who want life want more than religious activity in a religious setting.
I think there’s little point in our denying that we reduce full life to religious activities. It’s characteristic of us to divide work into sacred and secular. Preachers call their congregations to get involved in “the work of the Lord” and they mean by that some kind of evangelistic outreach or the cultivation of the congregation in terms of size and strength. We shouldn’t think outreach and mutual edification and benevolence is unrelated to “the work of the Lord”—far from it, but we shouldn’t dismiss a man or woman’s ten-hours a day job in a factory or an office or a home, providing for their families and paying honest debts—we shouldn’t dismiss this as if it wasn’t “the work of the Lord”.
Jesus believed in friendship and romance and marriage and work and pleasure—these he saw as gifts of God and called people in the name of his Holy Father to rejoice in them to God’s glory. Instead of sidelining friendship, romance, marital relationships, parent/child links, dreams and life purposes—instead of making people feel half-guilty for being involved in them, instead of suggesting that these are necessary but that they’re not truly what we’re to be about, we should be seeing them as avenues of joy and service to God. We’re to live, fully live, in all our human experiences as people attuned to God.
It’s true beyond debate that “romance” that isn’t shaped and expressed and rejoiced in as part of our living to God and his purposes mustn’t be the entire story. “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do,” Paul said in 1 Corinthians 10:31, “do it all to the glory of God.” How tragic it would be, and in fact is, when we knowingly exclude romance or any other human experience from that call.
Love—love of people, love of creation, love of life and supremely, love of God—gives us vision that loveless eyes can’t have. It makes sense to say that “love is blind” and yet we never see so well as when we love someone. Many parents and friends have said of some fine young woman that she is wasting herself on such and such a young man. They say things like, “I don’t know what she sees in him!” Precisely! They don’t and can’t see what she sees in him because they don’t love him.
This vision doesn’t only come to lovers who love other humans. It’s experienced by someone who has come to see God and love him. John Masefield has that incredible poem The Everlasting Mercy that tells us of the conversion of Saul Kane, a hard-drinking, hard-living and hard-fighting sinner. Once smitten by the thought of Jesus he says this about the world around him:
O glory of the lighted mind
How dead I’d been, how dumb, how blind.
The station brook, to my new eyes,
Was babbling out of Paradise;
The waters rushing from the rain
Were singing Christ has risen again.
I thought all earthly creatures knelt
From rapture of the joy I felt.
Say there are differences between loving God and loving another human—of course! But the psychological impact, the uplift of the heart, the strengthening of our purpose and the hopeful way we look at the world once loves enters feels the same. God is not ashamed of the truth that we experience joy with others humans as we do with him. Human loves are the gift and work of God!
I fully accept that romance is never romance as God would have it unless it has him in mind. I know too that as Ronnie Milsap put it in one of his songs, “love comes and goes just like the wind.” But again, to call a self-centered, self-serving mere feeling “romance” may be linguistically legitimate but we rage at its character and call it other things. Aristotle and Plato reminded us that we are not to take a stunted tree (or a stunted anything else) and treat it as though this was the measure of the rest. We shouldn’t do that with romance or friendship or family or any other relationship.
When we get tired or one of our loved ones has been mauled by what was called “love” or “romance” the world gets a little colder and gloomier and sourer. But at its best or at least when it moves in that direction, a friendship, a romance, a family, an employer, a teacher, a doctor— whatever—makes a believer out of you. One rugged, tender relationship of love stands as a challenge to all the fake stuff that a sinful human family comes up with.
The Christian will tell you that the supreme example of that is Jesus but God isn’t slow to acknowledge that there are people he looks at and feels proud of, people of whom we’re told he was not ashamed to be called their God. In a world of shallow promises and fickle people the glory of a man or woman, a couple or a family is a work of God and defies the sinister whisper that this entire creation enterprise is rotten and God-forsaken.
Charlie Chaplin said it well in a notable song to love’s deathless nature. This is my Song. One of the lines in his eulogy to love is this: [CLICK to hear the song.]
The world cannot be wrong if in this world there’s you!
Don’t give up on love—ignoring Paul’s immediate purpose there’s something lovely and strong in his claim that “Love never fails.”
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.
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