Love Love Love
- originally October 27, 2019
I've been spending my free time on writing that is not this, so it's been a bit longer than I hoped before I've managed to get a second post out, but at least it's still the same year, and that's not too bad given my record!
I could say a lot of things about love. That shouldn't be surprising given that out of the pie of things people say, a wide slice has to do with love. But it is a little surprising to me to find myself having things to say on the subject.
I was never one to think ahead much to what it would be like to fall in love. Never the kind of girl who daydreamed about the perfect wedding. (And believe me, I am feeling that now. I could use a few more well-formed ideas about how to go about this complicated thing!) The only ideas I had were that someone would come into my life who I could communicate deeply and clearly with and comfortably live daily life around. Those ideas have been met and exceeded. I didn't know it was possible to be this comfortable around someone or to find someone who showed this level of honesty about everything without it sounding rude and encouraged me to communicate with the same level of honesty in return. Things have been good. Together, doing normal everyday things is just more fun than doing them alone.
Being in love is new, and I'm glad that my experience of it has been very me. Not dramatic or flashy or akin to any storyline a hopeless romantic would have planned out, but straightforward, a bit silly, and thoroughly enjoyable to the tip of every last detail.
Since I've also been on this weird journey of finding out what life is like without believing in God, I've discovered a new love for people as well, along with a sense of awe at the capacity people have to love each other.
Growing up, I was told that people were inherently sinful, that the sentiment that says people are basically good was just a mamby-pamby snippet of wishful thinking proclaimed by those who would rather feel warm and fuzzy about life than face the truth. Sure people had some good in them—they were perfectly capable of being kind and all that—but none of us had a truly good basic nature. At our foundations we were all desperately in need of God's intervention to save us from our selfish and twisted ways. To suggest that mankind could be good apart from God was arrogance pure, simple, and stinky.
But I've found that as soon as I stopped requiring myself to believe that this was so just because someone said it was so, I started to become aware of how love is woven into what it means to be human. In fact, unlike everything I was taught, human nature is shaped by positives far more than by negatives. Yes, people have a large potential to be selfish, but we wouldn't be what we are without things like altruism and empathy. If the ability to put others above oneself isn't the image of God in man, if it isn't a remnant of God's grace, a gift given from outside of ourselves, contrary to our nature—then hoooly shit, despite all the selfishness that does exist, humankind is innately capable of a shocking level of selfless love.
Before losing my belief in eternal life, I don't think I realized what sacrifice really was. It's one thing to be willing to risk your life for others when you believe that there will always be eternity to see everyone you've lost again, but I'm overwhelmed at the thought that there are people like firefighters and soldiers who kiss their loved ones goodbye knowing that this is all they have and still walk headfirst into danger for the purpose of ensuring that others can enjoy a life in which they get to go home to their families.
Does it makes sense from a purely logical level, self sacrifice? I don't know. There's the immediate selfishness that says, Of course not; I have to preserve my ability to be here for what I love now, and who cares what comes after. But then there's also the logic that seems hard to deny that says, How could I not do my part to help keep the order that allows anyone to enjoy anything they love with security?
And I think it's fascinating that selflessness is instinctual. This intense concern that it's possible to feel for the welfare of a partner, a child, even a stranger, came about ultimately because of the process of evolution. Evolution. Something I was told for the first eighteen years of my life didn't actually happen and was just an elaborate work of self-deception on the part of anti-God scientists and Christians who didn't have the spine to stand up to them. How odd that in fact this same unguided process that has produced some creatures who eat their mates or kill their own close relatives soon after hatching has also brought about creatures who will knowingly give up everything so that someone else might have the chance to live.
It's also produced beings that have the capacity to dream up God, and this is another thing that dazzles me. If God isn't real, if all this was ultimately invented by human beings, then just look at what we have the ability to imagine. There are certain aspects of Christianity that I still find compelling. It is one of the most common shared systems of belief across the entire planet, and just look at what the central story of this religion that spread like wildfire in the first century is: that a God who needs nothing from humanity was so in love with these lesser beings that he became one of them, living the life of an underprivileged individual from a subjugated nation, misunderstood by most people he would ever meet, and experienced human suffering and death. If this isn't historical fact, then it is actually the product of human speculation on what divine love might look like, and I'd say it makes a pretty compelling story.
Yes, it's true that we can't overlook the parts of this story that don't make sense, all the disturbing conclusions that emerge as the only way to harmonize contradictory doctrines about sin, punishment, and forgiveness that have collected over the centuries. But the aspect that draws many people to this religion in the first place is a surface-level understanding of the narrative that says God loved us all so much that he had to go through everything we go through first-hand.
Incarnational love is a concept I was taught to notice by people celebrating the biblical incarnation of Jesus (although I can now only assume the actual Jesus of Nazareth would have strongly discouraged the idea that he was God incarnate), but it's a concept that I've continued to find striking wherever it appears. For one, I've been a fan of George Orwell for years, and one of the things that originally fascinated me about his work was that his early publications calling people to wake up to the inequality all around them aren't based simply on abstract economic and philosophical arguments supporting his point. No, before he could write satisfactorily about the life of a coal miner, he felt that he had to experience it. He stayed in a coal-mining town, went to work with the miners, and then wrote something that brought his fellow middle-class readers in to the heat and the fatigue, the blackened air and the limited life options. And there were other lives far different from his comfortable upbringing that he couldn't remain outside of either: He spent time living as a tramp so he could really know, not just assume, what it was like to be mistrusted and unwanted everywhere he went in his own country and then lived homeless in Paris to see what life was like for those struggling to get by and keep up appearances just enough to find work in a metropolitan city. I loved that his social concern and respect for people who weren't like him was carried to such a point that he needed to become someone before he felt qualified to write about them and their needs.
Along the same line, one of the things I immediately liked about my fiancé's personality was his interest in seeing things from the perspective of others. He has a talent for putting himself in someone else's head, working through things from their point of view, often until he comes to a place where he concludes, "Oh, I was wrong about that, and now I see why." He's one of the few people I know who are genuinely more interested in finding what they've been wrong about and all the new possibilities that come from this than about looking right all the time. And still his open-mindedness isn't quite enough for him. Sometimes he'll mention in conversation that what he really wants is to somehow be everyone, to somehow live from the perspective of other people instead of just imagining it.
I'm glad for a lot of reasons that I met him not long after giving up on my religious beliefs. For example, I got the added benefit of getting to know his friends too. This is embarrassing, but I just didn't realize, coming from where I was coming from, that there were so many truly nice, kind, respectful nonreligious people. I hate that I thought people themselves didn't have it in them to be kind and considerate to the level I now know is pretty normal without being trained in a religious system. It's one of the reasons I was so reluctant to leave my religion: I was afraid to lose the community. I thought it was the only place where people wouldn't just try to pressure me into doing things their way all the time. But—wonder of wonders—good old "brotherly love," things like neighborliness, friendship, and consideration, is actually not in short supply out here in the world.
Another benefit of getting to spend a lot of time with someone who has similar interests is all the great conversations that grow out of your time together. I forget if it was just before or just after we started dating, but around that time, my now-fiancé asked me if there were any songs with words that had a strong meaning to me. Something immediately came to mind, a line of a song I had identified with deeply for several years, but the problem, I told him, was that it no longer applied, and the funny thing too was that what I actually identified with wasn't the real line from the song at all but a mishearing of it. When I was Christian, this little line (or rather what I originally thought it said) had seemed to wrap up everything I felt and hoped within it, but that wasn't important now; I just didn't know what new sort of thing was important to me yet.
The mistake-altered line that I had held dear for so long was from a song by Juanes. (He was one of the first musicians I really took an interest in, and I still love his songs and lyrics in general today.)
What it actually says is, No me siento solo. Sé que estás conmigo. (I don't feel alone. I know you're with me.)
But what I originally heard it as was, No lo siento, sólo sé, que estás conmigo. (I don't feel it, I just know, that you're with me.)
I knew the song wasn't about God in the first place, but I was fascinated by the idea that someone else had gone through the experience of feeling no sense of another's presence or love and still choosing to tell themselves that that person was in some way with them anyway. That was what I had been doing for years, and I thought that was faith—to have no indication that something is true and yet believe it anyway. That was the love I was told to accept—a love that felt like nothing, that always left me feeling alone and wondering what I was doing wrong to miss God's presence in my life. I took comfort in the thought that it was okay not to be able to pick up on any of the things that usually come along with someone's presence and to simply declare that your knowledge of that person's claim that they are with you is enough.
But a couple days later I realized there was another song that had had a deep meaning for me when I was Christian and hadn't lost any of it. This one is "Under Pressure" by Queen and David Bowie. The part that gets me is David Bowie's verse:
... love's such an old-fashioned word
And love dares you
To care for the people on the edge of the night
And love dares you
To change our way of caring about ourselves
Those words have the same meaning for me now as they did when I thought love was something that had to be given by God. In the song, they appear in answer to the question, "Why can't we give love one more chance?" and they address some aspects of love that can be challenging and even frightening at first glance. Love is something that has always been old. After all, affection, attraction, selflessness, and all the things that go into love already existed before humans were aware of themselves as humans. By the time this song was written we already had millennia of poetry, songs, and stories on love. It's certainly not something to fulfill the desire of someone who wants to feel like they've invented something new. Besides that, if you really want to reach out into the full capacity of what love can be, you're going to have to challenge yourself to care about people who are on the edge of what you find unlovable. You might have to offer some sort of friendship or understanding to people who might already be too far gone, just in case there's a chance of luring them out of the hatred or fear they've chosen to hide in. And you'll almost certainly find yourself at some point in a situation where you're asked to spend your time and energy for the benefit of someone who's on the brink of giving up or of being swallowed up by something that's too big for them to handle alone. And, sometimes most difficult of all, a lifestyle of love will dare you to see yourself differently. When you really want what is best for others, chances are you'll find new ways to take care of yourself so that you can be your best for them. But this could require you to do any number of scary things, from admitting or accepting your flaws, to taking proper care of yourself even when a voice in your head chants that others are going to judge you as being self-centered for this, to putting in the hard work needed to bring harmful habits under control.
These same things that can make love seem overlookable or intimidating also fit right in among all the many points that make it good and powerful. Its old-fashioned quality is also a quality of timelessness. It will never be passé anymore than will drinking water or thinking back on memories. Love in its various forms is consistently indispensable and manages to keep surprising us every generation with new stories of how one being can care for another. And while the challenges love presents might make us stop and think twice about whether we can really take them on, they lead people to many of the actions that end up being the most fulfilling parts of their lives, not to mention making the world a better place for everyone.
So, love is this strange but familiar perhaps accidental, perhaps unavoidable part of sentient biological existence as we know it, and I'm so glad that I get to accept it as part of human nature and that I have the privilege of being in love with someone and spending time with a lot of people who show love and respect to those around them just because. Here's to David Bowie and my hopes of many more surprising glimpses into what the world is actually like.
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