When Love Comes to Town

A little while ago, a close friend of mine told me he believes love is all-powerful.  I agree.

It may take a lot of faith and hope to support it.  The willingness to believe that love is indeed all-powerful and to hope with an audacity deep enough to take the risks associated with loving someone or something can strike fear in the strongest of hearts, but it's worth it.

I repeat:  It's worth it.

Otherwise, artists would have no reason to paint.
Singers would have no songs to sing.
Writers would have no stories to tell.

But don't think for a second that I'm going to go off romanticizing.  What I think is most easily overlooked is just how difficult love is.  I doubt most artists - much less those who seek justice and peace in the world (artists in their own right) - would tell you it's easy to do what they do.

So, although Hollywood artists may paint pictures of sunlit meadows replete with roses, sparkling streams, and bouncing bunnies - making love a sweet melody, a long walk on a moonlit beach, or a passionate night in a dim-lit Parisian hotel room (ah, l'amour!) - it's just not like that.

I repeat:  It's just not like that.

Here's why.  Love, when it's love, always involves risk.  It takes leaps and bounds of hopes and loves to span chasms of doubt and fear wider than the widest canyons.  It's not easy.  Ever.  It's hard.  Really, really hard.  Deadly hard, sometimes.  To get theological for a second, look at the cross of Jesus.  Sometimes, people just can't take goodness staring them in the face.  But that's what love is.  Goodness defying goodness, the best of the best of the best of things, and we humans have the capacity for it.  Get that!  (And do something with it.)

And if you ask me, it's in the risk, in the vulnerability, and in the uncertainty that the all-powerful nature of love becomes most clearly known.  Because here's the thing.  To believe love is all-powerful is to recognize that love involves surrender - letting go of the things that seemingly stand in its way and trusting that, because it's love, it'll overtake the challenges.  Love isn't something we can control.  It's not something we can put in its place.

Love explodes.
Love creates.
Love redefines.
Love blows up the box - or, perhaps, shows us that the box was never there to begin with.

So, to say that there are things that can stand in the way of love is a contradiction-in-terms.  If it's love, nothing can stand in its way.  As another more important Paul once put it, "Love never fails."

So, to wrap up this already-overlong post, I want to throw out three illustrations of the point:

1 John puts it simply:
"God is love."  This little sentence, copula(tion?) and all, makes love make sense.  Because if love is about surrender - about letting go of the things we fear, then to say that you have faith and hope in the all-powerful nature of love is to profess a faith and hope in the all-powerful nature of God.  What I mean is this:  if God is love - if we can in some way equate the two - then to let love in is to let God in, to let God guide take charge of our thoughts and fears and lives.  To love is to get out of the way and let God work.  To "Stop," in the words of U2 (though perhaps not at their finest moment), "helping God across the road like a little old lady."

In his story "Out of the Snow," Andre Dubus put it like this:
"His blue eyes watched her. That is what he did most of the time, when she was angry or sad or frightened: watched her and listened. He had told her he stopped believing in advice years before he met her, or stopped believing people wanted advice; they wanted to be looked at and heard and held by someone who loved them. She said: "Nice night, Ted."

"Yes." He smiled. "Nice night, LuAnn."

And U2 (the greatest rock band in history, if you ask me),
put it this way in "When Love Comes to Town":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJ0WyPAELsk

So, go love someone or something.  We do, as Jefferson Airplane wrote, all want somebody to love.  Just be real about it.  Let Hollywood paint its pictures and rock stars sing their songs.

Change hearts.  Change minds.  Change lives.  Change the world.

To quote U2 once more:  "C'mon ye people / Stand up for your love."