What is love?

How do we understand something that is greater than our definitions of it?

Photo by gaspar zaldo on Unsplash

Jesus said to love your neighbor as oneself, but what does that even mean? We speak and sing and write profusely about love, but our dictionary definition seems to fall short of what the word truly encompasses. “Affection, “attraction,” “attachment,” “to cherish…” These are some aspects of the word that may be pertinent in some use cases, but certainly not all. There is also something deeper, something more inherently foundational to “love” than with these lesser words that we use to describe it.

It may be that poetry is more able to describe love than philosophy, but perhaps those two are no so different from one another. It is a complicated matter that involves not just emotion, but action, commitment, and connection. This is further complicated by the fact that there are different kinds of love. I love music. I also love chocolate cake, but neither of those are the same as the way I love my children. Neither is the way I love my children the same as the way I love my wife. The familial love in that case is similar, but with my wife there is also a romantic love with a personal connection that makes us “one flesh,” and includes an intimacy not found in any of my other love relationships. So too, the love I have for my neighbors and the people of the world differs from the familial love of my personal family.

The different kinds of love, each involving emotion, commitment, and connection, reminds me of the Holy Trinity. It is written “God is Love,” but what does that mean? I think that perhaps God expresses as the Trinity, three-in-one, as an act of love. For loving only oneself would be inherently selfish and not true love at all. Love is caring about the needs of someone else over your own. Love also requires all three aspects to be love, over mere compassion or empathy. I can be sympathetic to someone in need, even provide help to them out of compassion, but if I have no further connection to them, they leave my mind and I never consider them again.

Then there is the potential for the corruption of love. We inherently understand that love should be selfless and full of grace, but that can then mistakenly lead to allowing abuse. Such abuse then breaks and corrupt that love, even if the other party holds to it still. In Scripture, when we say that God is “wrathful,” it is always rather a rejection of abuse—either against God or against his creation and children. God sets firm boundaries with serious consequences, but in love, through grace, always provides a way towards restoration and redemption.

James tells us that love without action is meaningless. He speaks of “faith,” but I say love, for faith is the love of God. James makes clear that if we love God, we will love those he loves and treat them accordingly. So then I think love is threefold; it is the emotions that we associate with the word, but also a commitment to action and to hold onto that love, and finally a spiritual connection that goes beyond mere friendship or civil commonality.

Yet, there seems to be a problem with this definition, for Jesus admonished us to love our enemies. Certainly we can have few good emotions for our enemies, except perhaps pity for whatever evil they had suffered which has lead them down an evil path. Maybe the act of choosing to love them, to humanize them, is a commitment in itself or perhaps the commitment could said to be the non-violent resistance to their evil. The third aspect is the most difficult to associate with such a command; how can we have a spiritual connection with our enemies?

There is the age-old adage that, “but for the grace of God, there go I.” Perhaps that is enough to connect us to them. Perhaps it is the connection of all the human race, that we are all stuck under this curse of corrupt civilizations that breed anger and resentment, bigotry and hate, selfishness and greed, violence and oppression. If Christians were more concerned with saving souls from these—rather than some imaginary hell—then perhaps the world would be able to move forward in love.

There is precious little else I can hold to except that in the end only love will win. God is Love, God is Good, and God is Sovereign. So maybe I don’t need to fully understand love, draped as it is in the mystery of the divine. Maybe it’s enough to hold to faith in love and do my best to love better, love more fully, and love with an enduring hope. Perhaps that is the only truth here, that love can only be understood through experiencing it. Through a commitment to live it out. Maybe one day we will be able to build systems with a foundation of love, rather than self-interest, and together understand what love truly is.