FROM THE BOUNDARY
Every Christmas I watch the film ‘Love Actually’ starring Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Colin Firth and Bill Nighy. It’s set at Christmas time and consists of a series of vignettes in which the various characters discover or reaffirm love. The characters are a cross section of life – for example, a Prime Minister with a junior member of his staff, characters in a porn film, a writer and his Portuguese cleaner, a ten-year-old kid and his American schoolmate, a ‘past the sell by’ pop singer and his fat manager. There are moments in the film which ever bring tears to my eyes as I identify with this or that situation or where it’s just too mushy for dryness.
‘Love’ – it’s at the heart of everything human isn’t it? Poets incessantly write about it. Composers are inspired by it. Films ever trumpet it. It incessantly oozes, courtesy of the music industry. Priests preach it. Biologists and psychologists study it. And the rest of us spend our lives in search of it or determinedly cling to it. It’s what makes the “world go round”. It’s “all you need”. It’s ever “In the name of love”. It enjoins ‘send my love’. It proclaims its ‘power’. It’s a present given ‘with love’. It’s “I’ll always love you… my darling you”. It’s ‘I can’t live without you’. Once found “it can bloom endlessly”. It’s said to be ‘eternal’. It’s where ‘you sit with someone in the middle of a bench though there’s room at each end’. It ‘conquers all’. We say Jesus’ life was its embodiment. Whether mere projection or not, we say too that ‘God is love’ and so is the source of it all. It seems we humans simply can’t help ourselves.
Yet, consistently with all concept words, there’s no all-or-nothing definition of it, no one meaning. It’s obvious that my love for my wife isn’t the same as my love for my kids, or for my friends, or my dog, or of cricket, or poetry, or of my pipe, or for boiled sweets. Often it’s defined by what it isn’t. It’s not narcissism, or hate, or apathy, or lust, or indifference, or infatuation, or mere ‘liking’. Or, as St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, it’s not envy, or boasting, or pride, or dishonouring others, or quick to anger, or record keeping of wrongs. It doesn’t delight in evil. No, it’s patient, kind, protective, trustful, ever hopeful, persevering and rejoices in truth. We can say, too, that it implies attachment in terms of commitment, kindness, warmth, compassion, tenderness, selflessness, loyalty, delight in another’s happiness and willing it too. We speak of its ‘depth’ and ‘intensity’, conceive it as a search for oneness, and productive of joy, truth and beauty. It might be thought of as a ‘drive’ like hunger and thirst; or as both a ‘feeling’ and a call to action, to good deeds, to sacrifice. It may function as an overriding concept – ‘loving God with all your heart and your neighbour as yourself’. The Greeks made a compass of it: south – storge, familial love, kinship; west – eros, romantic love; east – philia, the love of the affections, of friends (as in my ‘Love Songs in a Zipless World’); north – agape, divine love, self-emptying.
All of which brings me to the Mass, the Eucharist, Holy Communion – call it as you well, call it ‘oneness with Christ’, the supreme moment in the Christian life. Call it ‘commitment to love’. Call it ‘yours actually’, never mind what the wafer and wine actually represent beyond this. On Christmas Eve, I attended the Christmas Eucharist in St. Matthew’s Church at my home in Wales. I sat beneath a stained glass image of St. Francis, and for me it ‘doesn’t get better than that’. As you would expect, the Eucharistic liturgy of the Church in Wales is very similar to our own. If you have one, I invite you to look at your prayer book and search for the word ‘love’ in that liturgy, the concept which rests at the heart of our faith and serves as a call to action in Christ. I haven’t mine with me, but I suspect you won’t find the word except in one of the post-Communion prayers and the Blessing. Yes, you’ll find “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord... In the name of Christ” – but then ask yourself how those words ‘love’ and ‘serve’ are actually being used. How like, or unlike, are they to ‘Go out and make sure you love and serve God’? How like or unlike are they to ‘Go in love and may the love of Christ ever rest in your hearts and in all you do’? They’re the words which end the liturgy, so they’re worth a second thought aren’t they?
With Christmas we’ve all been celebrating love in the birth of the Christ child. As we open our doors to let the New Year in this night, that same love transforms itself again into new life and a new hope. I want to say that with each new day a new love touches the world as the Holy One is born and reborn again and again in our hearts. He’s not a one in a 365 day fantasy. He’s ever as real as life itself, and his love is the love of all loves. May it ever be so for us.
Go safely, this New Year – until the next time.