I was hanging out with a three year-old last week. He came into the kitchen to make an announcement. In a manner that my choir director calls excited in a library, he said: “I’m. having. seedy bread”.
Enthusiasm for seedy bread is not something his five year-old brother shares. And I can’t say I’ve expressed the same level of joy as Pip has about it either. But I enjoyed Pip’s declaration greatly.
I find it very easy to love small children. They are fun to be around and I like that the way they live with so much immediacy becomes infectious.
bell hooks has an excellent book on love. The book is called, aptly, All about love. She talks about the practices of love as: care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and open communication. I like that she places an emphasis on love as being something that can be learned and practiced. It is not just something that is spontaneously experienced.
hooks quotes M Scott Peck for a definition of love. Love is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth”. We don’t often connect love with the idea of spiritual growth, but I think we should.
Loving Pip and his seedy bread is a delight. I’d like to find love as consistently uncomplicated in every area of my life.
More frequently, I relate to the part of M Scott Peck’s definition that makes love about extension. The context we are in makes a claim upon us, and we work out how to respond.
A sermon from Austin Farrer puts it this way:
“God makes us one another’s concern. When Jesus was asked “Who is my neighbour?” he did not reply with a philosophical generality; he did not say, “You are a man: mankind is your concern” He told the story of the traveller, who had a half-murdered man thrown in his path.”
I’ve learned that love is something I prefer to think about as a philosophical generality. It makes it easier for me to consider myself to be loving when love is conceptual. Anchoring it in my response to those God chooses to put in my way is more confronting.
“The school of divine love is common charity,” Farrer reminds us. “He that loves not the brother he has seen how shall he love the God whom he has not seen?” We don’t get to skip over the parts of loving that are difficult, inconvenient, and time-consuming. Spiritual growth doesn’t take place in abstract, but in the contexts we’re committed to even when they’re hard, with the actual people God has thrown in our path.
Relatedly, hooks says “growing up is, at heart, the process of learning to take responsibility for whatever happens in your life.” I like this. “Whatever happens” acknowledges that the contexts where we’re asked to extend ourselves in love are often not chosen ones, in circumstances we don’t have full control over. At the same time, we all have choices about how we allow ourselves to be shaped; who we allow to claim our love, and how we respond.
There are some current situations in my life where I’ve been wrestling with the claim love makes, and my reluctance to extend myself in response. I feel fortunate that we are now on the approach to advent, which offers a time to think about love made real. The incarnation of God in the life of Jesus is the extension of love to our half-murdered world. God allows himself to be placed in our path, and for us to make a claim of love on him. It’s one of my very favourite times of year for a reason.
thejoyofrachel 