Love in All Caps
Posted on by Malinda Collier
The word love gets used a lot. I’ve commented before that English does us no favor when it unlike other major languages fails to signal different kinds of love by the word used. I can both love ice cream and love my neighbor as myself. Same word – very different emotions and emotional commitment.
I’ve just finished reading a wonderful book titled Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature. Written by Farah Jasmine Griffin there is a terrific chapter on the transformative power of love. Griffin writes: Because of my own experience of having been so deeply loved I have no difficulty believing in its transformative power. To love the least of these is to be enraged by the conditions, if not the individuals, that enslave them. That love wins out over fear. That love inspires courage in the face of near-certain defeat. That love ought to be extended to babies in cages, to those in the throes of addiction, and to all those whom others would deny dignity and respect.
Wow. That is love in all caps. This is the love Jesus speaks of when he commands us to love one another. It is active. It is transformative. Griffin quotes bell hooks about this type of love: all great movements for social justice in our society have strongly emphasized a love ethic. A love that presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well. A love ethic differs from a sentimental, overly romanticized understanding of love. It is an action, rather than a feeling. Love is a choice. Love requires us to see each other and to commit to each other’s humanity.
James Baldwin helps us in this understanding of what it is to love. Writing in The Fire Next Time he notes the watering down of what love means, I use the word love here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, a state of grace – not the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
Our Baptismal Covenant speaks to this kind of love when it calls us to seek and serve Christ in all persons loving you neighbor as yourself. Our walk of faith is in the light of this kind of love. Not easy, not about being made happy but rather about daring and growth.
I do not get to hear the sermon as preached. I am downstairs with our youngest members. But late on Sunday afternoon when I first download the recording from Zoom and then upload it to our website, I listen. This past Sunday was particularly evocative as Father Benjamin told the story of the clergy gathering when many were speaking effusively of the support and community and collegiality of the diocese. One voice offered a different story. A person of color told a very different story. One that pointed out the unequal treatment and lack of support they had experienced in the same group. It takes bravery to speak up when your story is not the story being featured and lauded and embraced. It takes courage to say my story is not the same as yours.
A few years ago, during one of our Community Reads sessions two members – both of color – were equally as brave sharing with the group that they could not bring their whole truth to church, they could not tell their full story. It was then and remains with me now the most important question/truth I have heard in many years. And I am grateful that I heard it. I am grateful that in a different setting Benjamin heard it also, and shared his experience with us from the pulpit.
It takes a love that is about daring and growth to say my story is not the same. And it takes a love that is about daring and growth to make sure there is space to hear it. Our love response has to be equal – a love that is action, that requires us to see each other, to hear each other, and to commit to each other’s humanity.
This is the love that must be our tradition.
Malinda