A Fragment: on love, god, and a great woman

by asocialspirituality

I have this blessing (which is also a curse): An insatiable appetite for love; the incessant drive, however misguided and polluted, to give and receive it.  To feel it, in every crevice of my mind and body.   I want love to lay with me in the past as I sleep in horrors of my abusive childhood; I want it to rise with me in my present triumphs.  And I want this for everyone, even my enemies.  Everyone, I think, has this blessing (and curse).  I agree with Christian Smith: that love is normative to human personhood (that it’s what makes people people).  I don’t quite know what it is, however–or what it isn’t.  Love, that is: I haven’t much a clue about it.

“That’s precisely what love is,” a friend told me recently, after I shared this thought with him.  “And that’s what makes love love,” he said.  “It’s a mysterious, relational force that simply can’t be understood,” he continued.  “Love, then,” I responded,” is a lot like God: an ineffable source with which one is connected, even in one’s still-inexplicable depths (however misguided, however polluted).”  God, as Tanya Luhrmann writes, is something of a social (and loving) relationship.

I am still glued to the conversation.

There’s an interesting and unique relationship today, I think, between God and love.  It hasn’t always been this easy, afterall: to know (and to feel) God as loving.  Incidentally, it also hasn’t always been this difficult: to believe in God (at all).  It’s a secular age, Charles Taylor writes.  The old gods are dying, Emile Durkheim wrote into the future.  In terms of belief, as Ann Swidler would suggest, we’re in “unsettled times”: and, in response, people are using culture (their “cultural repertoires,” that is) more rigorously in order to solve what has become a problem of disbelief.  And indeed: it takes hard (psychological and social) work to believe in and experience a personal God, as Luhrmann writes.

However “rationalized” or “secularized” we’ve become, much remains mystery.  Things are still inexplicable; the universe(s), for example, we know, are beyond our grasp.  Love is at the center of this mystery as something that we desire in ourselves, in and with one another but can’t explain.  Though we’ve made love a hollow commodity (confused words and images spilt all over the market), many of us are in solidarity with Roland Barthes: “Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love, within myself, as a value.  Though I listen to all the arguments which the most divergent systems employ to demystify, to limit, to erase, in short to depreciate love, I persist: ‘I know, I know, but all the same …'”

Perhaps, in a secular age, love makes God easier to believe in.  Perhaps, that is, in an unsettled time of secularization and love, God is safe in the harbor of the sacred inexplicable.

Things, of course, are never so simple.  Love isn’t just a safe harbor for God; it’s also a dangerous one for God to be anchored in.   While love may indeed make God easier to believe in, that is, love can also make God more difficult to believe in.  This is because love, the sacred inexplicable, means different things to different people (it’s a relative meaning with variant consequences).  “The heterosexism associated with religion,” a woman said to me at a bar last week, “has made God impossible for me to believe in.”  A gay friend of mine, now an atheist, left God at his conservative church in New York.  “We love you but not your sin” (your sexuality; who you are, in other words), they told him.  His church would call their God loving, no doubt–and taught him to see a God who calls him a sinner for being who he is loving too.  Bravo for leaving that god, I say.  And bravo to our culture for creating the plausibility structures that have helped him to know that that’s not what love is, whatever it is.

I still agree with Dr. King: that love is the most durable power in the world.  The problem with this power, however, because it is discursively produced (while, for me, remaining ontological), is that it can be dressed in hatred and used to justify injustice.  Associating God with love, therefore, is a dangerous enterprise.

Teresa of Avila, the great Christian mystic of the 16th century, had a keen sociological insight: God has no body–no feet, no hands; no tangibility–but ours.  People, in other words, by virtue of how they represent the God they imagine, are the best proof for the existence of God.

A week ago to the day, the world lost a remarkable woman.  I lost a great mentor.  Dr. Elizabeth Leonard, a sociologist who worked tirelessly to educate the public (and the academy) about gender inequities in the criminal justice system (namely its sexist treatment toward battered women who kill their abusers), died of cancer in her beloved Ireland last week.  No one had a greater impact on my life (which legions, no doubt, can say) than she did.  Dr. Leonard taught me the little I know about what love is: and, by extension, who God is.  She taught me that love, that God, is a radical (embodied, often selfless) commitment to the betterment of others: that love, that God, is a force, which people actualize, that transforms bad into good; injustice into justice.  Were it not for her mentorship in college, disillusioned and traumatized as I was from escaping the cultish religious world which reared me, I doubt that I would have been able to marry God and love in myself.

If this fragmented musing (an externalization of peculating and disparate thoughts in my mind which, I hope, people will find resonance with), has a thesis, it is this: the manner in which we call God loving, and in turn represent God to others, in this secular age that is obsessed with love, is extremely important.  I have less interest in “leading people to an experience of God” than I did when I was an adolescent.  My evangelical fervor has cooled.  I do have a great interest, however, in leading people to an experience of love.  It’s our greatest weapon in the pursuit of peace and justice, as Dr. King said.  Given the salient relationship between the two (the way we imagine God is act of politics and poetry because of the extent to which it constitutes and governs individual and social life) it is imperative that the God we call loving is indeed loving (whatever love, and whoever God, is).