The Bravest Love of all...
I have recently being looking at love and what it is. A couple of experiences I've had recently have brought the topic to the surface and have piqued my interest in the subject.
I'm looking at love in terms of the love between a man and a woman.
In our modern day, what is love? Is it infatuation? Is it being nice? Is it being willing to die for the other person. Where does sex fit in? Can you have love without sex?
My contention is that in our modern world we have confused the two and have equated sex with love. A simple demonstration of this is in our use of the word "Lover". What is a lover? How are you a good lover? Well when we say "Lover", the word refers to a someone's sex partner. In other words, a "lover" is someone you're having sex with. To be a good "lover" is to be good at pleasing someone sexually.
It does not refer to sacrificing all for the person, it does not even refer to being vulnerable, or (sic) being friends! You don't have to know anything about your "lover", to be loved by them, and to be in a love relationship. How often in the movies are we told that the consummation of love between a man and a woman is the sexual act?
But you may ask, what is love really. When does "True" love exist. True love is when your total well being has been placed in the hands of someone else. In other words, when two people are in love it's like they've taken that which is most precious to them and given it to the other person to look after. They excruciatingly vulnerable and supremely powerful at the same time.
What braver thing could a man do than give someone the power to hurt him more than he could imagine? More brave than any physical challenge a man could confront in our world today. You want to prove you're brave, love, in that way. Take heart however, because just as she has the power to hurt you, you also have the power to hurt her. So you're both in the position together. That is the bravest love of all.
posted by Michael Wiles at 2:39 am
3 Comments:
You are so completely right about the way the world looks at love. It's not even up for debate that one has sex with one's girlfriend - with many that is the very definition of girlfriend. And so, the very words used to describe actual love (the feeling and the actions) have sexual connotations - live "lover" as you mentioned.
The Brave Love you're referring to seems like the perfect love relationship God had in mind. But we're fallen, it's nigh impossible not to hold back part of ourselves, not to entrust everything to another - we need to be self-preserving. And who's to say two years from now you might still have the other's wellbeing central but she has forgotten about yours, and so only one is now vulnerable - and that could really just be considered foolhardiness.
I think it then becomes a matter of entrusting yourself to God - He is looking out for your good and we must trust that even if our lover (in the true sense, the person we love) breaks our heart, it will be used for our good. So loving another becomes proof of trusting God, opening oneself to be vulnerable is really placing faith that God will be there. It becomes an act of faith just to love a human being, which makes it all that much more beautiful.
Great post Mike.
Just a clarification about my first paragraph - when I say I have a girlfriend, it is automatically assumed by the world that she is my sexual partner. Even among Christians a large amount trust in the purity of the platonic boyfriend-girlfriend relationship has gone. That's what I meant by the sexual connotations of even simple words like "girlfriend".
While I was reading what you were saying the image of Christ and the Church came to me. One of the purposes of marriage is to provide an image of Christ's relationship with the Church. "Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church". That vulnerability is an image of the trust relationship that exists between a Christian and their maker.
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