And I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch
And love is not a victory march
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah

–Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen

The only sound in my house is the soft buzzing of the LCD display on this laptop. I am not entirely sure I have ever heard that sound before, so rarely am I in a place this quiet and solitary. My wife and oldest son are on mission, the other children are with their grandparents, the dog is asleep, there is no music playing, and my phone (amazingly) has not gone off in some time.

It is probably, then, an excellent time to reflect on love. I have spent a lot of time thinking about it, and yet I never can point to a time when I have been able to fully grasp its essence, like trying to build a sand castle with sand that is too dry. You pile and smooth it with your shovel, you pack it into the forms you want to shape it, but the sand will never quite stay in the shape you know it needs to be in, and the towers crumble as the moat pulls the walls down toward it. If you move closer to the ocean it behaves a little better, but then the water makes it mushy, and sandslides are imminent. The sun beats down on you and the incessant mutter of the waves mock your progress, until you decide to call it quits and go find your mom. And as long as she exclaims over it (and maybe even notices the flag you put on top, and the cave you built underneath, and the way the drawbridge so cleverly spans the murky water), the morning on the beach has been a success.

And as I think about why I used that analogy, something comes to me: Could it be that with my thought I am trying to construct something out of love, instead of seeking to uncover what is most real about myself and those I love and the life we move through together? The thought rings true to me, and the idea that a block of marble might be a better starting point than a beach presents itself; and yet I know I am no better a sculptor than I am an architect, so I am left with the reminder that Michelangelo had to finally lay down his chisel with a regret just as poignant and piercing as when Wren gazed for the last time on the edifice that was his greatest masterpiece. And the incapability of created things to truly express eternal beauty wins out once more against my very American sense of reductionism.

How can a person possibly have an accurate idea of what love is, within such a rapid and self-centered culture as the one in which we live? We hurtle through the vicious corridors we have built for ourselves of money, achievement, power, sensuousness, appearance, and status, and along the precipitous way we somehow expect to love and to be loved by others. We would not know love if it whacked us on the head, and the terribly ironic thing about the Christian life is that’s almost always exactly what happens.

The world we live in tells us much of love. It is merely a feeling, a completely effusive and unrestrainable way to suck the marrow out of life, a predictable tool (perhaps even a weapon) with which the strongest and smartest people can continually extract meaning and value from those around them. And when we reach a point when love can no longer do that for us, it’s not love any more, and therefore no longer needs to be a priority, and may therefore be dispensed with.

But the bare facts about life that you know when you are 39 years old stand over against such a definition. What is to be done with all the aspects of love that we see every day? with that indescribable quality that binds two people together in marriage, that makes a friendship such a thing of beauty, that pretty much on a regular basis keeps parents from murdering their offspring, that can bring a wounded heart to forgive the one who deeply wounded it, that makes us feel so alive when we are experiencing its fruits, that makes us taste so bitterly of death when we have wronged someone we are near to, that – with all its elusiveness – still constitutes most of the reason we find ourselves willing to go on walking through a life that can be so full of pain and sorrow. All of us in our most honest moments know in our souls that DH Lawrence was right about love (and our culture wrong) when he said that it “blossoms unexpectedly and without law”, and that in the long run we never really can wrest it to ourselves for our own enjoyment. And the longer our foolish hearts seek to find what we most need in people instead of in the One we were made for, the more poisonous a thing love will become for us, and the closer we come to that fateful moment when a human being makes the cataclysmic decision that existence without God would be better than not being able to hold onto the things of this life; that is, the doctrine Christians call Hell.

Every person wrestles with this tension, and those who claim they do not have merely progressed so far into the darkness that they’ve stopped telling the truth about who they are and what love is. It is the one thing in life you must have to be okay, and is therefore the one thing Jesus so gently but firmly insists we must let go of, if we are to walk in His footsteps. For the words Jesus gave to his followers in this regard are not to be taken lightly. He said if you truly love someone, you have to be willing to lay down your life for them. An easy enough prospect, we think, and imagine a glorious videotaped moment when the bad guy asks whether we’ll take the bullet for the one we love, and we think Screw it and offer ourselves up to be taken out in one white-hot flash of bravery.

That is not what He was talking about. He was describing a long trajectory of faithfulness even when our hearts don’t want it, that sick feeling that comes when we realize we’ve betrayed and wounded someone and have to walk down a long dark road of penitence, the utterly devastating realization that we cannot love well and will never be able to without the Spirit indwelling us each moment, the loving whack on the head from someone who loves you much more than they love your happiness. He was not describing the fickle light cast by our culture on the work of our lives that tells us we have achieved all that our hearts desire, like the dead shadows cast by the moon; He was describing a life lived under the intense focus of a dazzling Sun that brings all of our deeds out of darkness and into His marvelous light. And as we follow Him, we find to our amazement that even such a pitiable structure as a sand castle (that all our lives kept crumbling and sliding so grievously away) can yet be redeemed, and in the last reckoning will be found to have been built on the Rock that is a refuge for our souls.

JV

Author: Jeremy Vogan

My name is Jeremy Vogan. I live in Staunton, VA with my wife and four kids. I love to write, and seek to honestly explore the intellectual and emotional implications of following Jesus as a deeply broken person in a twisted, cruel world that is full of veiled beauty and meaning. Writing is part of how I faithfully look for Jesus Christ to someday make all things new. I'd enjoy hearing your feedback! JV