ON FAITHLESS LOVE

Yesterday was a beautiful day and I was having a picnic with a couple of old friends—good friends and good people, though not Christians.

After a couple bottles of wine and lots of great stinky cheese, I asked my friend how his family was doing. He spoke of an ongoing feud between an uncle and his mom over a family cottage. Though the cottage was supposed to be equally shared, the uncle was trying to squeeze out his sister. Eventually they had to sell the property because they couldn’t resolve the dispute, which poisoned things between the two families.

But recently, the uncle had joined some kind of therapeutic group, and telephoned his sister to apologize for behaving so badly. My friend was moved by this, and then began passionately speaking of his own recent experience with a serious illness; “When I was in the hospital and I didn’t know if I was going to make it, I looked all around me and saw the people I loved, and thought; Man, it’s not about the money or the success—life is all about the love. Because in the end, that’s the only thing that’s real.”

The other friend and myself both nodded emphatically. His story had personal significance for me because it reminded me of my own conversion to Christianity. What awakened my faith was a realization that went something like this: The one thing I know to be true with every fiber of my being is that only Love can quench our deepest human longing. Love is the answer, and the truth about what it means to be human.

From there it was a short step to realizing that this was not my ‘own’ discovery—but the revelation at the very heart of Christianity; I read the holy books of every religion and discovered that nowhere else was love even remotely identified with God. So if my own experience of truth corresponded to this ancient religious tradition that goes back thousands of years, it was in fact verifying the truth of that tradition.

But the point I would like to make involves the following paradox: if we were to take an opinion poll, I would bet that the vast majority of people surveyed would agree to the following statement: “In the end, love is the only thing that really matters.” This sentiment is echoed ad nauseum in films, TV shows and pop songs to the point it has almost become a cliché: yet this is the same society in which Christianity is rapidly declining. In other words, while the heart of the Christian revelation has been largely accepted as true, we live in a culture that is aggressively rejecting the Christian faith.

How can this be?

This is an extremely complicated question and deserves a much longer treatment, but here I would just like to debunk a popular myth that is often associated with secular humanism: that this is not a Christian revelation at all—it’s just ‘common sense.’

If it were indeed ‘common sense’ it would be universal. I am sure that if you took our poll question to North Korea or to a tribe in Africa you would get much different answers: the most important things in life would probably be honor, success, a prosperous family etc. The reason ‘In the end, love is the only thing that matters’ makes us nod our heads in agreement is because Christianity is so deeply embedded in Western culture.

Let me close with a criticism and a cause for hope. First, it is utterly shocking that given our present climate of consciousness that the Gospel is not taking root. Why is it so difficult for us to take what is accepted as spiritually true in our culture and return it to the Christian tradition?

But it is also hard to imagine a more fertile soil than a culture that has already accepted the spiritual supremacy of love. With this in mind let us not be disheartened, but pray for the courage to share this extraordinary faith.