February 3, 2013 | 4:00 p.m.

What Is Love?

Edwin Estevez
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 71
Luke 4:21–30
1 Corinthians 13:1–13

What is love? I’ve actually reflected on this for a long time. Is it an action, a feeling, something tangible, something invisible, or mysterious?

Over the years, I’ve set out on a quest (yes, I’m using the word quest) to ask all sorts of people—all age groups, genders, various career types, and those who were single, married, divorced, and everything in between—what is love?

But rather than share something I’ve collected over the years, I thought I’d start with my colleagues here at Fourth Church, so that you could get more recent and thoughtful answers, being that many of my colleagues are clergy that think through a lot of these things.

Of course, the first response from one pastor was “What is love? Baby, don’t hurt me, no more.” Yes, as in the big hit dance song, made all the more famous because of Saturday Night Live, which in turn inspired a movie. Well, now that we got that out of the way . . .

I decided I would need to expand my field work, and here is where Facebook and emails come in handy. So, I will list verbatim some of the answers I received:

Love is not a feeling; it’s an ability.

Love is when you are able to accept someone’s flaws.

Love for a majority of people is a dependency on one another. Love to me is the space that exists between two individuals.

Love is Decision

It’s something relational, beyond that I’m not sure.

Love is that grace that allows us to be gracious.

Love is your soul’s recognition of its counterpart in another.

The willingness to sacrifice

Love is never giving up on people, humanity, this world; though there may be pain and hurt . . . love = forgiveness = healing = rebirth

It’s the thing—maybe the only thing—that trumps self-interest in the decision-making process.

Love is desiring and doing what is in the best interest of another person, without violating your own personhood.

Love is the feeling and thinking for the best of one another! It is sending a muaaaaaaa from the heart! It is embracing passionately while simultaneously the muaaaaaaa delights and enjoys in itself!

In the words of Tito Bambino, whose song sings, “Love is magic, a dream.”

Love is that feeling that develops naturally. We don’t buy it or sell it. We don’t decide when it happens. It’s a force capable of moving the whole universe if we wanted to. It has no boundaries, no limitations; it is not an obligation or a law we have to follow.

When you feel all warm and fuzzy inside and you can’t stop thinking about a person

I’m not sure we know what love really is until we experience God’s grace in heaven. I think about all the sins I commit (knowingly and unknowingly) in a day and somehow I’m still forgiven? It truly is awe inspiring, that kind of love.

Love is Super Glue.

I say Love is Easier Said than done but way worth trying.

Love is that feeling you get at the top of a rollercoaster.
     Your stomach in knots,
     Excited for what’s to happen next,
     Terrified of what’s to happen next,
     But you have faith, and you give in,
     And you allow yourself to be taken over the edge anyways.

Love is feeling comforted and excited at the same time.

Love is embracing the world and its beauty through a second set of eyes.

Love is seeing someone’s inner beauty.

Life, Optimism, Vulnerability, Everlasting = LOVE

Loving someone or something is the response to recognizing God in that person or thing.

What is love?

If you pause, close your eyes, and could imagine love, what would it look like? What would it sound like or taste like? What would it feel like?

What is love?

This same question was asked of elementary school kids, all under the age of nine, and here are their responses:

When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn’t bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That’s love.

When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different.

Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other.

Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your French fries without making them give you any of theirs.

Love is what makes you smile when you’re tired.

Love is when you kiss all the time. Then when you get tired of kissing, you still want to be together and you talk more. My mommy and daddy are like that. They look gross when they kiss.

Love is what’s in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen.

Love is when you tell a guy you like his shirt and then he wears it every day.

Love is like a little old woman and a little old man who are still friends even after they know each other so well.

During my piano recital, I was on a stage and I was scared. I looked at all the people watching me and saw my daddy waving and smiling. He was the only one doing that. I wasn’t scared anymore.

My mommy loves me more than anybody. You don’t see anyone else kissing me to sleep at night.

Love is when your puppy licks your face even after you left him alone all day.

I know my older sister loves me because she gives me all her old clothes and has to go out and buy new ones.

When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you.

You really shouldn’t say “I love you” unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget.

The Scripture tonight that Laurel read for us, 1 Corinthians 13, may be familiar to you if you’ve been to enough weddings; it is one of the most famous texts on love ever written. Even for those who are irreligious, the literary power of 1 Corinthians in both the original Greek and in its translations is found in its rhetorical skill, the rhythm as each line makes a stand, profound in its simplicity but also in its context. It is written in Greek, to a Greek context, and if you’ve ever taken a philosophy course on the subject of love or would like to do some further reading, you would note that the ancient Greeks had much to say about love and, in fact, had four words for it—storge, agape, eros, and philia—that were greatly discussed by philosophers like Aristotle (except for storge, which was more of a dutiful love reserved for familial obligation).

But this evening, I want to be careful with this text. It can have the effect of making us feel so inadequate when it comes to love, or we can use this text to justify a horrific situation in which we find ourselves, dealing with it because love “suffers all”—which was used in oppressive ways in the past and is morally bankrupt. Or it can set up our expectations so high that when we’re in a relationship, we expect our partner to always be patient and kind—and sometimes we don’t match their effort—or we expect that our own love will gush over and burst out and make up for our partner’s shortcomings and we’ll have enough patience and kindness: we’ll endure.

I don’t want to linger on all the ways in which we don’t live up to the ideals set out in this text, which uses the word agape for love—so this isn’t a friendship love or a dutiful love or even necessarily a romantic love, but as later Christian theologians would press, this is about God’s love. This isn’t about us feeling bad and inadequate. Rather, in Rome and in the Hellenic culture, rhetoric was very important. Speeches were important. So you must imagine that the Apostle Paul has written this to be read aloud by a church in Corinth that is struggling with the concept of love, how to share it, bestow it, receive it, witness to it. He’s writing to them because they have some mighty divisions between rich and poor, between Jew and Gentile, between who’s in and who’s out, so Paul wants to redirect their attention to what matters.

Love. More than faith. More than hope. Love. Whatever knowledge they have or great speech, it doesn’t matter without love. The imagery is striking: we sound dissonant in all that we say or do, like a clanging cymbal, without love. Paul goes further: this love, this agape, endures and lasts forever.

An article titled “There’s No Such Thing as Everlasting Love (According to Science),” which appeared in the Atlantic, mentions

Fredrickson, a leading researcher of positive emotions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents scientific evidence to argue that love is not what we think it is. It is not a long-lasting, continually present emotion that sustains a marriage; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship.

Rather, it is what she calls a “micro-moment of positivity resonance.” She means that love is a connection, characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person—any other person—whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day.

Jonathan Haidt, another psychologist, calls these unrealistic expectations “the love myth” in his 2006 book The Happiness Hypothesis:

“True love is passionate love that never fades; if you are in true love, you should marry that person; if love ends, you should leave that person because it was not true love; and if you can find the right person, you will have true love forever. You might not believe this myth yourself, particularly if you are older than thirty; but many young people in Western nations are raised on it, and it acts as an ideal that they unconsciously carry with them even if they scoff at it. . . . But if true love is defined as eternal passion, it is biologically impossible.”

Love 2.0 is, by contrast, far humbler. Fredrickson says, “I love the idea that it lowers the bar of love. If you don’t have a Valentine, that doesn’t mean that you don’t have love. It puts love much more in our reach every day regardless of our relationship status.”

Here’s what I love about this article: it recognizes that we are physically incapable of the “love myth” of being all things to a person, of satisfying every need and want at every moment, of being passionate, romantic, all the time.

It challenges the idea that there is someone out there that meets all the sometimes silly expectations we have of relationships; it challenges the Prince Charming myth or the One myth that says someone must match all that we demand, even if our lists might include seventy-two items, everything from how many times they work out at a gym to the coffee shops they love (which is actually from a hilarious article that can also be found in the Atlantic).

There’s something else I love about this article: it talks about love in a relational way. Love has a story. There are connections. It’s not simply something you hold on to, but rather something you share. And we share this with all things, all the time. In that sense, it endures as long as relationship endures. In fact, a church father, Augustine, talked about how love surrounds us but that there can be disordered loves when we don’t put all our loves in their proper order, which for him must be placing God as our first love.

And here is where this article falls short for a person of faith—or simply doesn’t aim high enough. The promise of 1 Corinthians 13 is that even though we cannot generate the everlasting love myth that the article so legitimately criticizes, God can—and God does. Disordered love focuses on us, Augustine would say, but Ordered Love, the kind of love 1 Corinthians is talking about, focuses on God.

Yes, this passage makes us aware that we don’t always share this love or live into this love, but before we dwell there, I must first point out that Paul wants to center us on the love of God—not on our shortcomings, not on all the ways in which we fail.

Instead the focus is on all the ways God is faithful, gracious, and loving. Paul wants to remind us that the source of our love doesn’t come from the perception we have of ourselves or others. It doesn’t come from the image we project in the world or the one in the mirror looking back at us. It’s not found in our books, our movies, or our music. It’s found in God, the love of God—that God is love. We can replace “agape” in this text with God, because God is love. God is patient. God is kind. God suffers all, endures all, and lasts forever.

No, this isn’t a passage focusing on our inadequacy and failings, but rather on the power of God’s love and what it can do through us and with us. We can be witnesses to God’s love. We can be agents of love. We can close our eyes and dream, just as children, that we are loved beyond our own capacity to love ourselves, and as adults, we can know this to be true.

Do you lack patience and kindness? God is patient and kind. Do you lack perseverance, humility, or hope? God perseveres, humbles God’s self, and offers us hope. Just when we look at this list and say, “But I’m not” or say, “I can’t,” God says, “I am and I can.”

The beauty of love is precisely that it doesn’t boast or is proud; God doesn’t hold it over us that we cannot match this everlasting love nor generate it; instead, God shares it. When we feel no love, God overwhelms us with love; when we feel isolated, God surrounds us with love; when we are at our worst and most selfish, God pours out love with extravagance and as preached at the earlier services today, God’s love goes too far, farther than we can go. But we’re not asked to stay behind or told that we’re excluded. God asks of us the impossible task of love so that we might center ourselves on God’s love, from which all other loves receive their power, for God is love.

We’re invited to get caught up in this love so that in the small ways we can begin to show that love: to ourselves, to our neighbors, to our enemies, and in these small ways, we are caught up in God’s extravagant love that goes too far and that, in fact, has transformed the world, is transforming it, and will transform it.

Of all the definitions and descriptions I received about love, this was my favorite:

          Love is that feeling you get at the top of a rollercoaster.
                    Your stomach in knots,
                    Excited for what’s to happen next,
                    Terrified of what’s to happen next,
                    But you have faith, and you give in,
                    And you allow yourself to be taken over the edge anyways.

It is my favorite because I imagine myself as a child, exhilarated, thrilled, scared, and eager to experience this ride, alongside friends and family, caught up in all its rhythms and movements, like a journey, for love is also a journey; it is fraught with risk but sustained with joy; a journey with God and in God, in which we’re caught up in God’s love.

This evening, I ask you to imagine yourself as that child atop the rollercoaster. Believe again. Do not live so jaded. Do not be so pessimistic. Do not surrender to cynicism when it comes to love, because it was never about our own capacity to love anyway, but about God’s—and our privilege and joy to participate in God’s love.

Let yourself get caught up in God’s love, in all its rhythms and movements because, for while all will end, Paul tells, even our physical capacity to love, this love, God’s love, endures forever. Amen.