02/14/08
 
Because it’s Valentine’s Day, I’m writing about love.  It’s not an easy topic. It’s difficult to deal with without getting sentimental, cynical or bookish, but I’m game to try it with realism, humor and spirituality.
 
Most of the copy and advertising surrounding this day is about romantic love. Fair enough, hooray for candied hearts, roses and kisses -- human or chocolate -- but there are other kinds of love. Philosophers, theologians and scholars have written pedantic studies distinguishing agape and charity, romantic love and selfless giving, love of nature, country and God. My aim is to avoid their bookishness without abandoning their valid distinctions.
 
Saint Valentine was one of many Christians martyred by the ancient Romans. Until the liturgical calendar reforms of 1969, the Latin rite of the Catholic Church celebrated his feast  on February 14.  His connection with romantic love, however, dates only from fourteenth century England. In his Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer had lots to do with it, but I’ll leave the fascinating details of all that to English scholars.
 
Whatever its history and connection to today’s celebration, romantic love has continued to attract and mystify songwriters and poets.  Listen to the hesitancy in the title and lyrics of John Denver’s “Perhaps Love.”
 
Oh, love to some is like a cloud
To some as strong as steel
For some a way of living
For some a way to feel
And some say love is holding on
And some say letting go
And some say love is everything
And some say -- they don't know.
 
John Denver sings poetically, others are much more cynical. Here’s the American Humorist Fran Lebowitz. “Romantic love is mental illness.  But it's a pleasurable one. It's a drug.  It distorts reality, and that's the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw."
 
Some say love is warfare between the sexes.  But as Henry Kissinger joked it’s a war we will never win because there is too much fraternization with the enemy.
 
And one more cynical if humorous comment from Yip Harburg another songwriter.
 
Oh, innocent victims of Cupid,
Remember this terse little verse,
To let a fool kiss you is stupid,
To let a kiss fool you is worse.
 
I guess that’s as good a transition as any to kisses and physical signs of affections. All physical affection, of course is not sexual and all sex is not love, but romantic love does make the world go round and sex increases the race -- in more ways than one.
 
Bil Keane, the cartoonist creator of Family Circus said, “A hug is like a boomerang - you get it back right away.” That’s one of the reasons physical expressions of love are so popular.  Usually they are mutual and the pleasure is shared and immediate. Besides there are some things that can’t be put in words. Ingrid Bergman put it well, “A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.”
 
But romantic love does not last and, as most of us know from experience, can get very complicated. "The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews." (W.H. Auden)  When lovers marry or live together, no matter what their education, sophistication, age or orientation they are destined to differ and sometimes clash. Only then will a mature, more selfless love take hold, if it emerges at all.
 
Isn’t that what Paul means in his famous poem in First Corinthians 13?  He’s not talking about kisses and cuddling. “Love is patient and kind…not jealous or boastful…not arrogant or rude.” Love does not keep a record of wrongs.  And inevitably there will be wrongs. These failings of our partners are the moments of truth. They call out for forgiveness. That’s why the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said, “Forgiveness is the final form of love.”
 
Spouses learn what love really is after the bunny rabbit stage is over and children are disrupting meals and threatening everything in reach. That’s when married love grows or dies; that’s also an opportunity for relatives or friends to love. When grandparents, for example, watch the children overnight, they’re giving the harried couple a chance for a leisurely dinner, a movie and a motel room. God knows that’s a welcomed gift; it’s a loving one.
 
Mature love does that.  It works at loving in ordinary everyday acts to ease the burdens of the other. Uncomplainingly, instinctively it picks up the dishes from the table or the clothes from the dry cleaners; it takes out the garbage or walks the dog; it prepares a meal or the tax returns.
 
But love doesn’t only mean helping people. It can mean concern for the environment, for society, for country and ultimately gratitude to the Source and Ground of it all.  The mystics of the great religions, sometimes to the embarrassment of their more prudish coreligionists, often used sexual imagery in speaking of love of God. That will not surprise readers of the “Song of Songs” in the Hebrew Scriptures or Saint Paul’s comparison in Ephesians 5 between a husband’s love for his wife and Christ’s for his church.
 
Let me end with the poet Kahil Gilbran, whose wise admonition “let there be spaces in your togetherness” is often read at weddings.  Here he speaks of something deeper.  “When you love you should not say God is in my heart, but rather, I am in the heart of God.”  Only everyday acts of loving will transport us There.
 
Daniel O'Rourke is a married Catholic priest. Retired from the Administration at SUNY Fredonia, he lives in Cassadaga, NY.  His column appears in the Observer, Dunkirk, NY on the second and fourth Thursday each month. He has published "The Spirit at Your Back," a book of his previous columns. It may be purchased or comments sent to orourke@netsync.net