Love as a Way of Being – Thoughts on Valentine’s Day
Back in 1847, Boston pharmacist Oliver Chase invented a machine that made apothecary lozenges. He sold these lozenges for sore throat relief. But the same machine could just as easily stamp out small pieces of candy. Candy made with Chase’s machine turned out to be such a success that he eventually gave up on making medicinal lozenges and founded the New England Confectionary Company or NECCO. During the 1860s, Oliver’s brother Daniel Chase experimented with printing words on the company’s candies. He devised a machine that used vegetable ink and a felt roller pad to print words into the candy paste before it was cut and baked. As a result, Sweetheart candies—those small candy hearts with quirky sayings printed on them– were born. Each Valentine’s Day season, NECCO sells about eight billion of these tiny hearts with messages like “Be Mine” or “Kiss Me” (or even “Fax Me”) around the globe.
Valentine’s Day, our annual celebration of love, happens today. But what kind of love are we celebrating? Love has become one of the most watered-down words in the English language: I love the weather. I love you. I love that cup of coffee. So what is love? “A merger of pleasure and risk and sacrifice. A dance of alternating vulnerabilities. A wellspring of joy. A challenge to endless learning by mistake. The moment to moment evolution of care,” says NPR host Krista Tippett in her book Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living. We have opted to live love as a feeling, Tippett writes, “when love is actually “a way of being marked by compassion and care.”
John’s first letter also reflects an understanding of love as a way of being. “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (1 John 4:7-8). If God’s behavior defines love, then its primary characteristic is the giving of oneself to whatever enhances or shelters the life of another. In both Hebrew and Arabic, the root of the word for “womb” where life is generated is also the root of the word for “compassion.” (Rechem and Rahem). Loving is generative. It gives itself to the nurturing of other life beyond itself.
Xavier Le Pichon is a biophysicist. He has spoken about how we usually tell the story of our human evolution in terms of tools and skills. Humankind emerged and progresses when we learn to knap flint blades, domesticate animals and plants, or smelt iron. But what most strikes Le Pichon is something quite different. Something that tells another story of human evolution. Fossil evidence demonstrates that Neanderthal and other early humans cared for people in their groups who were injured or disabled or elderly, often at great effort and sacrifice to themselves. “They reorganized themselves around the small ones, the babies…people in great difficulty through suffering or sickness, because of handicap, or because life is coming to an end. And that’s really very new and special,” he writes. “It becomes a society which we call human, humane…There is a new touch, a new kindness, a new softness, a new way of living, which is completely introduced by the fact that you put the weakest at the center of the community.”
Valentine’s Day comes once each year to remind us that love is not a sentimental feeling but rather a way of being. Love is choosing to give of ourselves to the nurturing of life, particularly the lives of those who are vulnerable, fragile, or marginalized. “Love is patient; love is kind…it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Corinthians 13:4-7)
Happy Valentine’s Day, Pastor Thomas
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