The Cost — and Promise — of Love

In her poem, “Moonlight,” Sara Teasdale wrote of how “The heart asks more than life can give. / When that is learned, all is learned.” Deep down, we know she is probably right, but we want her to be wrong. We want there to be enough love to go around and meet all of our wants and needs. Alas, we live with the tensions and emotional contradictions of that reality.

In so many ways, both love and life are the stories of our comings and goings; much like the prophet Elisha of this weekend’s first scripture. He found his way in and out of the town of Shunem, and so also in and out of the lives of two of its residents, a generous woman and her husband who came to invite Elisha to stay at their home whenever his needs or his path came that way. They even added an extra room for him to stay in. So is the nature of people who love us.

We, too, seem to pop in and out of one another’s lives, our own comings and goings benefiting from one another’s kindnesses and love. In one it may be a coming that lasts for much of a committed lifetime, but mostly life is of the nature of both comings and goings, among friendships and neighborly folks and those who accompany us in making a living. This week’s gospel is indeed one strange and peculiar gospel; one we instinctively rebel against. To our confusion and disgruntlement, it seems to posit that we should love God over all others, even those in our family. Why can’t there be enough love to go around, we ask ourselves? Why must there be priorities to our love?

The reality is that the loves of our lives do seem destined to take on the nature of such comings and goings, not because we cease to love but because new loves and new dreams creep in. Our parents come to mind. It was Jesus who took note of that in this week’s gospel. “Whoever loves a father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,” was how he put it. Jesus was not suggesting there was something wrong in deep love for a father or mother, or even that we need to modify our love for them. Rather he who was God’s love-made-flesh came that we might give birth to an abundance of new love. So it is that for so many of us, the time comes to move on in life, on into new love, not because that early love we found in family has run its course but because that early love has grown and blossomed into something new and worthy of being loved beyond our birth family. And so, we find ourselves going on, moving on into new love, into more love. For some that new love is marriage and family. For others, it takes the shape of commitment to service of the larger community. Love always seems to grow and then blossom.

Is that not so as well with sons and daughters? Parents come to recognize that the fruit of their mutual love into which they have poured so much of their love must at some point be set free — painful perhaps, yet so necessary. Again, it was Jesus who put words to such love. “Whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”

It is always as we watch life move on from one love and into another love that we find it accompanied by an ache akin to loss. Too often that ache seems to be the necessary soil for the seed that gives birth to new love. Again, that was the wisdom of Jesus. “Whoever finds one’s life will lose it, and whoever loses one’s life for my sake will find it.” Whoever finds love and holds on to it will lose it, and whoever is willing to risk losing it by allowing it the freedom to grow will find it anew.

Perhaps, then, Sara Teasdale was right after all. The heart does ask more than life can give, yet what life cannot give in fullness, love continues to promise in hope. The gospel does not ask us to love less: It invites us to love more deeply, more freely and more generously, trusting that love is never diminished when it is shared. In Christ, we discover that every true love finds its source and fulfillment in the God whose very nature is self-giving love. And so, we continue our own journey of comings and goings, losses and discoveries, carrying within us the faith that every act of love, however costly, is drawing us ever closer to the One in whom all love becomes one.

FOR REFLECTION