ONE SIMPLE LIGHT
A Reflection on Love

28 December 2003
James Ishmael Ford

In that abyss I saw how love held bound
Into one volume all the lives whose flight
Is scattered through the universe around;
How substance, accident, and mode unite,
Fused, so to speak, together in such wise
That this I tell is one simple light.
Dante, The Divine Comedy

It was the minister’s habit to begin each service with a brief story for the children. She would have them come to the front of the sanctuary, sit on the floor with them, tell the story and at the end dismiss them to their classes. I think that particular congregation usually sang the children out with “Go Now in Peace.” Anyway one day she decided to use that old Socratic inquiry method, drawing out their own understanding of squirrels in order to guide them into a discussion of industry and preparation.

She gathered the children, they all sat down together and she said “Instead of a story, I’m going to describe something to you. Hold up your hands when you think you know what it is.” The children all nodded their heads in assent. She said, “This thing lives in trees,” and paused. But there was no response. “It eats nuts.” Again, she paused, but was only met with silence. “It’s gray or brown.” Another pause. “It has a bushy tail.” A very long pause.

The minister was beginning to feel anxious; she began to imagine a bead of sweat forming at the edge of her brow. She said, “It jumps from branch to branch” (pause), “and chatters and flips its tail when excited.” At last one child very timidly raised his hand. She sighed inwardly and said, “Yes, Tommy.” Then the boy replied, “I know the answer must be Jesus, but it sure sounds like a squirrel to me.”

Today I want to reflect on the greatest field of projection we have in our human imagination, one where perhaps we carry the most opinion and at the same time the most confusion. Today I want to explore the most powerful force in our human lives. I want to talk about something that is both the still small voice which whispers in our ears in the dark night and is a hurricane that destroys everything in its track. Today, just in case you get confused along the way, I’m not talking about squirrels. But I am talking about something that has to do with Jesus. And, Moses. And, Mohammed. And Buddha. And Confucius. Indeed, I’m talking about the core principle of every religion. Today, let’s explore love.

At all times we are faced with the consequences of choices made. However today our nation’s armies on the march abroad and at home we are engaged in what some have called culture wars. We are facing decisions of how we will be, at peace or at war. The consequences of our decisions will play out in many lives for many years. So it seems to me we should redouble our efforts to understand what it is that motivates us.

We all know love is notoriously difficult to define. The word means everything from a score in tennis to sexual attraction between people to the driving force of the universe. So perhaps we need to reign in our definitions just a little and see if we can find some common ground from which to speak.

Thomas Lewis and his associates Fari Amini and Richard Lannon wrote in their study A General Theory of Love “Although the nature of love is not easy to define, it has an intrinsic order, an architecture that can be detected, excavated, and explored.” Personally I’m fascinated by the scientific exploration of our interior lives, those “grubby roots of our affections” in T.S. Eliot’s felicitous turn of phrase.

I think we would be foolish to not to be aware of the natural history of those driving forces in our lives, our perceptions and feelings. At the same time we shouldn’t limit ourselves to that exploration as a scientific quest with its necessary distancing from the subject. Otherwise we find ourselves like Heinrich Schliemann who in his enthusiastic quest for Troy dug right through it. We don’t want to miss love in an exploration of neuro-receptors. The issue is too important. So, today while acknowledging how love births in our biology, I hope we’d give the greater part of our time and attention to reflecting on how it manifests in our lives both for us as individuals and within our social structures as a primary driving force.

No wonder our Greek speaking forbearers had so many words for love from Eros to Agape. Our experience of love or its absence is so multi-faceted, so mysterious, so powerful. It is only a small wonder so many of us consider love God. The catch is this god love is in fact not Hallmark Card stuff; it is not sweet or simpering. This is a terrible divinity that pulls us together and tears us apart.

I suggest love is an elemental force. Here we experience the love of a mother for her child, the love of one person for another, the love we might feel for our country, the love that can wash through us as we walk in the White Mountains or on a rocky Maine beach. But and we can’t turn from this fact: it is also love that pulls triggers and signs death warrants. Love’s manifestations are many, awesome and awful.

At least that’s my thesis.

So, today, a day where we don’t need just to hear, but also to share, when each of us will be given a chance to speak out of our own reflections, let me help to set up the conversation just a bit more by addressing three things about love: how love is power, how love is dangerous, and how love is necessary.

Love is power. Martin Luther King actually inspired this reflection. "What is needed,” he told us, “is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive.” It is important, however, in these dangerous times to note he didn’t stop with that assertion. Dr King also stated how “love without power is sentimental and anemic.” Then he went to the heart of what I hope we will explore today. “Power,” that great preacher of good and of love taught us, “at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love."

I believe love is a source of power, in fact love is power. And as such may be used well or badly; but, it will be used. So, if this is true, we need to give love constant attention. Of course there are many ways to approach this subject, so massive it has almost uncountable doors into its mysteries.

Love is dangerous. Christmas night Jan and I watched the 1951 version of A Christmas Carol, the one with Alistair Sim as Scrooge. When that terrible scene played at the end of Scrooge’s encounter with the Spirit of Christmas Present I thought to myself. “That’s what I need to talk about when I address love on Sunday: the dangers of love denied.” Of course, I promptly forgot my intent.

Then the next day as I was perusing that remarkable little book, A General Theory of Love, (I really recommend it) I found I wasn’t the only one to see the compelling connection between that scene and the nature of love and how difficult and dangerous it all is. In a section titled “Truth and Consequences” the authors of the General Theory wrote. “Just before the stroke of midnight, while Ebenezer Scrooge is having his last discussion with the Spirit of Christmas Present, he spies two skeletal figures huddling under the latter’s green robes.

“They are the children of Man, the Spirit tells him, Ignorance and Want. Appalled at their pitiful and cadaverous condition, Scrooge demands to know what can be done for them. ‘Have they no refuge or resource? He cries. The Spirit counters: ‘Are there no prisons?’ he asks, skewering Scrooge with his own miserly incantation against beggars (and revealing the dangers of love denied). ‘Are there no workhouses?’ The clock strikes twelve, and Scrooge (is moved on from that horrible confrontation as he) faces his last and least forgiving ghost, the specter of things yet to come.”

And here is another danger, love misunderstood. We need to ask what pulls our emotional response to that scene? Is it mere sentimentality? And I think we need to acknowledge Dickens’s was a master pusher of the sentimental button, puller of the sentimental string. But this scene takes us through sentiment to gate of authentic love. And it brings up again a part of the problem of definition. I believe when we speak of love we are not in fact approaching a noun, but rather a verb, love is a thing that only appears within action. In fact, I think there may be no such thing as love. There is really only loving. And that brings up the necessity of love.

Lewis and his friends speak to this when they write. “Loving is limbically distinct from in love. Loving is mutuality; loving is synchronous attunement and modulation. As such, adult love depends critically upon knowing the other. In love demands only the brief acquaintance necessary to establish an emotional genre but does not demand that the book of the beloved’s soul be perused from preface to epilogue. Loving derives from intimacy, the prolonged and detailed surveillance of a foreign soul.”

Here we are confronted with the necessity of love. At least I say so. But the important thing is to ask, what has that all to do with love and peace, with culture wars, or to return to that scene from Dickens and those two skeletal children, Ignorance and Want?

So many thoughts and feelings poured forth from me witnessing that scene, even though I’d seen it maybe a hundred times before. Here we are confronted with the desperation of so many lives, the harsh reality that we all must face, where there really are lions of hate, want and ignorance wandering the world seeking those whom they may devour. Want and Ignorance. And don’t forget the Spirit warns us, it’s the boy, its Ignorance we must most beware.

But ignorance of what? Yes, we need education, learning to read, to figure, to reason. But, even more fundamentally, if we hope to find our way through this time of war, if we hope in the culture wars to be of actual use, we must learn the terrible and joyful aspects of love. We must move from the false god of sentiment, to the dynamic divine action. We must, I really believe, we must know in our own hearts what love can be. It is here opening ourselves and not turning away from that mysterious other that love becomes wisdom dispelling ignorance like a lamp dissolving the night.

So, just in case you got confused along the way, I wasn’t talking about squirrels. This was about that thing connected to Jesus, and, Moses, and, Mohammed, and Buddha, and Confucius: about the core principle of every religion. And, that brings us to the next part of our life together. How do you understand love? What is its mysterious texture in your experience? How do you understand love?

(Congregational Reflection)

One more possible definition of love. Stephen Jay Gould described how he was in New York City with his family shortly after the terrible event of nine/eleven. They were eating in a restaurant, after which they were going to deliver masks and shoe pads to the workers at ground zero.
Gould writes, “As we were about to leave the owner asked if we would deliver a dozen Apple Brown Betties, ‘our best dessert, still warm from the oven. Please give them to rescue workers.’” Gould thought to himself, “How lovely, but how meaningless, except (perhaps) as an act of solidarity connecting the cook to the cleanup.

“Still, we promised that we would make the distribution and we put the bag of Apple Brown Betties atop several thousand face masks and shoe pads. Twelve desserts for thousands of workers.” As I read this passage I felt so many echoes of words said to me about various things we do in this Society, about Band-Aids and working for change. I thought about war and peace and culture wars. I thought about those children Want and Ignorance and what it is we might do, what you might do, what I might do.

“Well,” Gould went on. “Those twelve Apple Brown Betties went like literal hot cakes. What I had judged as trivial, were little drops of gold for the stomach and the soul. We gave the last one to a firefighter, an older man in a young crowd, sitting alone in utter exhaustion and he said with a twinkle and a smile restored to his face, ‘Thank you. This is the most lovely thing I’ve seen in four days—and still warm!’”

Lovely, lover, love.

Amen.