It’s becoming increasingly evident in our impulsive culture …nothing.
While Valentine’s Day has often been associated with the celebration of romantic love in many regions around the world, today’s ideas about love have changed; as American singer Tina Turner vocalized in her 1984 number one hit song, “What’s love but a sweet old fashioned notion.”
Unfortunately there is a growing contingent who believes just that, love is nothing more than “a sweet old fashioned notion.”
While medieval literature is filled with examples of knights setting out on adventures and performing chivalrous deeds for ladies because of their “courtly love,” today’s ideas about love hardly emphasize nobility and chivalry.
In 1936, C. S. Lewis, one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day, wrote The Allegory of Love, further solidifying courtly love as a love of a highly specialized sort, among whose characteristics include humility and courtesy.
In 1956, the Irish-born scholar married American writer Joy Davidman who, a short four years later, would die of cancer at the age of 45 (1960).
Lewis’ raw, deeply personal confession of anguish and crisis of faith in the weeks following his wife’s death is specifically reflected in the following passage from his book: A
Grief Observed (published in 1961), “I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch?
She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?”
“[Joy] was a splendid thing, a soul straight, bright, and tempered like a sword.” She had filled every nook, said Lewis, of his heart, body, and mind.
This lay theologian resolved, “Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”
Lewis would depart this life and join Joy seven years later in 1963 as a result of kidney failure, one week before his 65th birthday.
Author David Wolpe writes in a 2016 Time Magazine article titled, “We Are Defining Love the Wrong Way.” “Love should be seen not as a feeling but as an enacted emotion. To love is to feel and act lovingly. Love is not an obligation done with a cold soul. But neither is it a passion that expresses itself in cruelty, or one that does not express itself at all. The feeling must be wedded to the deed.
“We would have a healthier conception of love if we understood that love, like parenting or friendship, is a feeling that expresses itself in action. What we really feel is reflected in what we do. The poet’s song is dazzling and the passion powerful, but the deepest beauty of love is how it changes lives.”
The tent-making Apostle Paul held that no matter what a person says, what they believe, or what a person does, they are bankrupt without love.
As author Eugene H. Peterson paraphrased Paul’s words found in 1 Corinthians 13 (Paul’s chapter on the subject of love):
Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others
than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it
doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled
head,
Doesn’t force itself on
others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the
sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others
grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the
end.
Paul reminds us, “We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!
“But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.”
I’d say loves got a lot to do with it.
Former Cook County Commissioner Garry Gamble is writing this ongoing column about the various ways government works, as well as other topics. At times the column is editorial in nature.
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