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Love
"God is love" (1 John 4:8)
2/1/2012
In cold, gray February, when Christmas is gone and spring seems far away, we compensate by celebrating St. Valentine's Day, the festival of love.
Who was St. Valentine? There are several Roman Christian martyrs who bear the name "Valentine," and their histories are vague, sketchy and often indistinguishable. Perhaps the best known is a priest who was arrested by the emperor Claudius II in the third century for, among other things, counseling couples to solemnize their marriages in the bosom of the church, which was a despised illegal sect in the Rome of that time. Legend has it that in custody he charmed and entertained the emperor until, trying to convert him to faith in Christ, he enraged him, and was executed in 269 A.D.
Valentine's tenuous connection to romantic love was not solidified and widely celebrated until more than a millennium later, when he was recreated as a fictional character in Gregory Chaucer's "Parliament of Foules" in 1382. His feast day, February 14 – the day of his martyrdom – was celebrated by the Roman Catholic Church from the fourth century until 1969, when Pope Paul VI dropped him from the official roster of saints because of the sketchy documentation of his history. But St. Valentine – or at least the celebration of love associated with his name – retains a hold upon our imagination. Because in a world rife with disaster, distorted by injustice and haunted by death, we cling to love as the greatest good.
Romantic love most often springs to mind first. It is intertwined with the biological imperatives that keep the race alive. When it is in full bloom it dominates our imagination and renders us giddy, it strikes us unsummoned from preadolescence to old age, and its disappearance or disappointment plunges us into despair. It is celebrated in holy scripture with God's implied blessing in the Song of Songs. And yet romantic love is only one variety. We are acquainted with the fierce love of parents for their children, the deep, still love and wordless intimacy of couples who have walked together for decades, the love between friends who have accompanied one another through their life cycles and are closer than brothers or sisters, the love of artists for their crafts and patriots for their country and athletes for their teammates.
The Greek of the New Testament expressed these various dimensions of love through three distinct words. Eros is the love of desire. In popular culture it is associated with our sexuality, but really eros is any love which finds its satisfaction in that person or object that fulfills its desire. There is, for instance, an eros of power and an eros which has as its goal material possessions. Philia is the love of friends and colleagues and teammates, in which strength and capacity finds its equal in another and rejoices in the shared quest or experience. And then there is agape, the powerful and creative love which overflows unconditionally and shares its abundance without regard to the value and dignity of the recipient.
It is agape which is typically connected with God, both in his spontaneous creation of all extra-divine reality, and in his utterly unmerited offer of reconciliation (renewed relationship) and redemption (freedom from the slavery of sin) to us when we have made a train wreck of our lives and of God's creation. There is the agape of creation, when God joyfully says, "Let there be…" (Genesis 1:4, 6, 14), and there is the agape of redemption, when "God commends his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).
God is the author of love; indeed, "God is love" (1 John 4:8). In this our culture's month of love, may we direct all of our loyalties and affections, from the most powerful to the most trivial, to the One who is the author and goal of all love. And may we be the world's lovers in his spirit and according to his values. "Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another… If we love one another, God lives in us and his love is perfected in us" (1 John 4:11-12).
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