On Christian Love, or, How to Stop Being Afraid of Emotion

I was just listening to a talk by Wesley Hill, one of my favorite current authors, about the nature of friendship in modern society and especially in the Christian Church* when an idea struck me.  Hill was talking about views of friendship throughout church history, and he quoted Samuel Johnson, who thought the idea of particular friendships were inherently un-Christian.  "All friendship is preferring the interest of a friend," Johnson said, "to the neglect, or, perhaps, against the interest of others. . . .  Now Christianity recommends universal benevolence, to consider all men as our brethren; which is contrary to the virtue of friendship. . . ."  And this is, of course, at least partially true.  We are called, as Christians, to love our neighbor as ourselves, to pray for those who persecute us, to invite the poor and disadvantaged to eat with us and share our possessions, and to an extent, it makes sense: if we favor one, we are going to favor less or even ignore others.  We simply don't have the capacity to love that much.  (But then, doesn't that make Johnson's point nearly meaningless, anyway?)

But putting that thought aside for a moment, I was struck a little by the implication Johnson makes, one that I think I've seen echoed by many Christians in my day.  The implication is something like this: a rationally "correct" intellectual, detached, disinterested sort of love that checks all of the required boxes is preferable for Christians over an emotionally invested and understood interested sort of love that includes true affection and positive feeling.  The second, I think Johnson would say, is the sort of love that obscures the truth, that puts up blinders and makes us so singularly focused that we do not see the universal need of those around us.  It may even cloud our judgment to the point where we think we are doing good by those around us when in reality we are only really engaging our own emotions and encouraging our own prejudices, and so to counter that, it is best to use a cool, rational sort of love, one disconnected from human passions and directed equally toward all through sheer willpower.  It seems to me to be a similar voice that speaks in the modern day and says, "I do this for your own good; the best way to love you is to show you your shortcomings, to point out to you where you are lacking, and not to get too emotionally close."  It is a voice that is afraid of sentimentality, that relies only on the intellect--that fears that same emotion that most would call "love."

I don't blame them for this.  I have often thought of Jeremiah who says wisely that "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?"  I have lamented the corruptibility of my emotions, the way they can bend me like a sapling in a strong wind, seemingly powerless to resist what I know to be incorrect.  I have been crushed under the weight of unrequited love, of loneliness and depression and grief, even when I knew the truth was that I was loved and not alone and full of reasons to be glad and comforted even in my sorrow.  But emotion has a way of convincing you of its truth, even when all of the evidence points in the other direction.  And so I have also had to build barriers.  I have resisted certain friendships; I have filtered my affections.

But then I am surprised again by the gospel.  Over the course of this last holy week I read most of the gospel of John, my favorite of the four, and I was reminded again why it is my favorite.  At the end of the book, after Jesus has died and then risen from the dead, he appears to his disciples who are fishing.  They don't realize who it is at first, but when he tells them to cast their net on the other side of the boat after a very unsuccessful night and they consequently haul up scores of fish, John says to Peter, "It is the Lord!"  And I love what happens next.  "When Simon Peter heard it was the Lord, he put on his outer garment, for he was stripped for work, and threw himself into the sea" (John 21:7, emphasis mine).  Peter was so excited to see Jesus again, so moved by his love for him--and, mind you, this is not the first but the third time that Jesus has appeared to them--that he couldn't wait for the boat to get back to shore and had to swim there himself.  Throughout John, you see this same kind of love manifested by the disciples for Jesus and vice versa.  The disciples loved Jesus fiercely because they knew that he loved them first.  This sort of intense, emotional reaction to the person of Jesus is, perhaps, the only good explanation of why so many of them were willing to die for him, even after he had been gone for decades--and this is only one example of this sort of emotionally compelling, invigorating love.  Is this the love we ought to be showing one another?  Is this the love that Johnson suggests is appropriate?

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The love that Johnson and, I think, many modern Christians advocate for is detached, disinterested, and intellectual--but this doesn't seem to me much like the love Jesus and his disciples had for each other.  John, in fact, never refers to himself in his book in the first person, but always as "the disciple Jesus loved."  This doesn't mean, of course, that Christians shouldn't use care to temper emotion with reason, but it does mean that perhaps Johnson's anti-friendship model of universal love wasn't modeled by Jesus--and, perhaps, that we need not be so afraid of emotion as to cut it out entirely.

After he quotes Johnson about friendship, Wesley Hill quotes another in response, this time an English convert to Roman Catholicism, John Henry Newman.  The chunk is good, so let me quote it all here:

"There have been men before now, who have supposed Christian love was so diffusive as not to admit of concentration upon individuals; so that we ought to love all men equally.  And many there are, who, without bringing forward any theory, yet consider practically that the love of many is something superior to the love of one or two; and neglect the charities of private life, while busy in the schemes of an expansive benevolence, or of effecting a general union and conciliation among Christians.  Now I shall here maintain, in opposition to such notions of Christian love, and with our Saviour's pattern before me, that the best preparation for loving the world at large, and loving it duly and wisely, is to cultivate an intimate friendship and affection towards those who are immediately about us" (emphasis mine).

Hill is using this to demonstrate the appropriateness of particular, close friendships, but I want to take it a step further.  If Johnson's universal love was a distant, detached love, Newman's sort is profoundly emotional.

Like I said, we are afraid of an emotional sort of love.  Emotions are difficult to control and are unpredictable, and we are called to love everyone, so we conclude that the sort of love with which we love our neighbors is necessarily a love of the mind, or the will.  But Newman offers a different solution.  Instead of loving out of sheer will, he proposes we train our hearts to love through friendships--essentially, that we practice loving until it comes naturally.  He proposes that we let our love for our particular friends be a force that trains your heart to react charitably toward other people, to reach out in tenderness and compassion, to be humble and gracious and giving and forgiving.

As I think about this option, it rings true to me.  How much more Christlike is it to reach out in love than to build up walls "for our own good"?  How much more like Jesus is it to let ourselves be transformed by compassion than to be driven by a Pharisaical need to be correct according to the letter of a law?

I think, when we are honest, "tough love" rarely seems to be anything like love to anyone involved.  Even the tough-lover doesn't feel like they are loving more often than not, I would wager.  Not to say that there is no place for discipline or reproof; a father who fails to discipline his son is, even in this day and age, ridiculed for it, and parenting experts still warn against giving a child too much freedom or "the benefit of the doubt."  But it seems a little absurd (and extremely contrived) to say that the best way to love a person is to cast them out of your home, or to constantly clobber them with passages detailing their sin, or to refuse to bake them a cake.  It may seem like the most calculated, logical way to deal with something you disapprove of, but I doubt it is what Jesus would have called love, and I can guarantee you that the recipient of this obvious disapproval doesn't think they are being loved at all.

I don't mean to get political.  But is it possible that, in our desire for correctness, we have mistaken what it means to love well?  Is it possible that love really is as straightforward as it seems, that it is in fact largely based on feeling?  Is it possible that we might train our hearts to feel love for those we don't know, even for those who would be our enemies?  And might this radical, powerful emotion of love be so transformational that those who had not known God is drawn to him through this unlikely, even impossible, love of his people for the world?

I am a feeler; I know not everyone is.  But this love that Jesus called us to, this love that motivated the apostles to spread the gospel, even when it led to their death, seems too powerful a thing to be something we can simply will ourselves to.  It seems like it is a result of an inner transformation, one that is begun by the Holy Spirit and that continues under his guidance--and perhaps the Church and the brothers and sisters it gives us, these powerful connections that bond us closer than blood relatives, is a lesson in this same love.  It motivates, it inspires, it moves to action.  It is not a result of personality, but of spiritual growth.  This is the love of 1 Corinthians 13, a love that is patient and kind, that endures all things, that never fails.  Have we forgotten this?  Have we forgotten what it means to love--or worse, have we redefined it to fit our personalities, our cultures?

I surely hope that, by God's grace, we can be known as a people who love.


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*A lot of these ideas of his are also echoed in Wes's book Spiritual Friendship, which you can (and should!) order from Amazon here.