He would call it love, even call it falling into Love, with the
woundedness of all creation.
The word love, however, is bandied about with such incautious
disregard for its power, so prodigally scattered on the sidewalk.
People love ginger molasses cookies, their cat, and their mothers –
hardly the same things. The word love, to Billy’s mind, is so
diminished by excessive use, that it is not worth bending down to
pick it up from where it has been dropped.
(from The Undertaking ofBilly Buffone by David Giuliano)
At the end of the 5th chapter of Paul’s letter to the Galatians we find a verse that talks about the so-called fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Sounds like a bunch of different things right? However the verse talks about the “fruit” of the Spirit. It is singular. One fruit that is all those things, where all those virtues are to be found. I think of the list as the various flavours that one finds in the singular fruit. Maybe one bite has a strong burst of love while the next has the overwhelming taste of joy, and the there is a hint of gentleness (and so on).
Maybe that is a good description of life in the Spirit. On different days we manifest (hopefully) different virtues to a greater extent than others.
This newsletter we start at the beginning of the listed virtues (after all the song reminds us that the beginning is a very good place to start). And the beginning taste is love. I wonder if Paul thought that love should be the predominant taste, with all the others being afternotes?
AS it happens, the day after Sharon told me what the theme for this issue was I read the above quote in the novel I bought to read over Christmas (but did not actually start until January). It struck me as containing a great deal of wisdom. After all ‘Billy’ is right. Love gets used in such a wide variety of ways and not all of them are the same. Does overuse lead it to lose its power and meaning?
Maybe?
There is certainly a difference between loving a particular cookie and they way we love another person – or at least I hope there is. And if we use the word and pretend that it means the same thing i all those uses then we do lose some of its power and meaning. However I think that even if we don’t always say it outright we know that we are using the same word in a different way. Several decades ago C.S. Lewis wrote The Four Loves, which I hope to read some day, to remind us that there are different things meant by the word Love.
When Paul talks about love as the first flavour of the fruit of the Spirit he is not talking about loving cookies. He is not talking about philio, brotherly/sisterly (siblingry?) love. He is not talking about romantic love He is not talking about erotic love. Paul knows that when we are filled with the Spirit we are moved to agape love, to love each other as God loves us, to love deep to the core. In specific instances that may include aspects of philio or eros or romance but it goes deeper.
The love that flavours life when we are filled with the Spirit is that love that, as Paul says elsewhere, “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7). This is love that pushes as to see each other as being made in God’s image. It moves us to work to create a world where all are allowed to flourish. It leads us to consider not just our own needs but the needs of our neighbours. It is the core of what it means to live in The Way of Jesus Christ, to live as a citizen of God’s Reign.
I think that is why it leads the list of virtues we call the fruit of the Spirit. I think that is why it is the predominant flavour we get when we take a bite of God’s promise. Certainly it is why Paul says to the Corinthians “The greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13)
So take a big bite of the fruit of the Spirit. Let the multiple flavours fill your up. Savour the love which provides the foundation for life.
Oh
and it is still okay to love cookies. It just might be something a
bit different.
--Gord
No comments:
Post a Comment