Does Love Have What It Takes?

“Without a more profound human understanding derived from exploration of the inner ground of human existence, love will tend to be superficial and deceptive.” - Thomas Merton

Current US politics invite pondering of the question, “What’s happened to love?” When corruption, deceit, concentration camps, and lies are the engines behind governance, how can a topic like love even make it onto the table of discussion? Is love too mushy and soft to face off against violence and autocracy? Or is love the divine power by which a great correction will happen?

Call me Pollyanna, but I continue to hold out hope and belief that God has not yet abandoned Project Earth. Throughout the Bible’s 4,000-year history, societal cataclysms have threatened the sanity and well-being of humans on earth. So present times should not be considered any worse than humans have had to flounder through before. In Romans 8 (during another time period of armed calamity), Apostle Paul makes the audacious claim, “nothing can separate us from God’s love.” In 1 Corinthians 13, Apostle Paul again extols the virtues of Love. These references often get usurped to be syrup laid on in wedding ceremonies, but the honest references are not to romantic love, but rather to an abounding power or force that holds all creation together. Love is the substantive spiritual force that binds together our very existence, including civility, dignity, beauty, and joy-filled honor. Faith in such a love as this is not “superficial” nor “deceptive.” Love is sufficient to command a commitment to pursue the path of love and to do so without violence. Where violence arises, death reigns.

We believe in a God of Life. We must hold fast to that fundamental existential truth. We must stand arm in arm with love as the reminding shield against any forces of any empire that removes freedom, sustenance, care, and truth.

So, if we stand on a hill overlooking the battlefield plain spread out before us, we can easily see the forces of cruelty, greed, mayhem, and evil insanity. They are facing off against the forces with the greatest three spiritual gifts in their quivers: faith, hope, and love. The greatest of these is love. May we work diligently, each in our own Spirit-guided ways, to pray & act with “profound human understanding” to proselytize, teach, lure, and brandish Divine Love that holds cosmic powers over our world, while banishing all golden calves and false idols.