…Without Christ
Falling in love is a leap in the dark, a surge of irrational romanticism, a step you’re sure to regret. Love is a palace of existential design, and no one who has thought it over ever goes there. The front door is gaudy but the floor will not hold. Entering houses without foundations is dangerous, and the smart people run for the hills:
I find a fatal flaw
in the logic of love
and went out of my head.
You love a sinking stone
that will never elope
so get used to the lonesome,
girl, you must atone some.
Don’t leave me no phone number there.
- “Gone for Good,” The Shins
That’s how things stand without Christ on the playing field. In the natural setting, no one is worthy of my love nor am I worthy to be loved by anyone. No criminal of the heart is really adorable, and this is what we are. Everyone will break your heart, given the chance, and the beautiful will do it a little faster.
Without Christ, all love is irrational—admirable but insane. Nevertheless, our leanings to love unreservedly and whole-heartedly reveal that we were meant to love, and that we were meant to love perfectly at that. The unlikely conclusion: We were intended to love perfect beings and be loved by them in return. Only Jesus gives this picture the tincture of reality.
Christ restores the logic of love, because he reanimates scarred hearts with compassion and reinvests dirty lives with purity. Christ pays off the criminal debts we accumulate through self-centered living, and provokes a massive reversal in our lives: instability to wholeness, emptiness to wealth.
This is the power of the cross: disintegrating lives are salvaged from sin and death and set on a transformative course that leads to life. The blood of Jesus sweeps through a black and cancerous heart and makes it good. Outside of Christ we are bent and unstable. In Christ we are being made perfect. Thus, only Jesus restores the logic of love.
We turn to the God who is eternally beautiful, glorious, and trustworthy, and find our souls restored. Jesus is the first and final lover, and when we embrace him, Christ in us assures us that love is not a losing wager.
3 comments:
Here are Milton's timeless words on wedding, unfallen love, to which all fallen couples since can only aspire:
...into their inmost bower
Handed they went; and eased the putting off
Those troublesome disguises which we wear,
Straight side by side were laid; nor turned, I ween,
Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites
Mysterious of connubial love refused:
Whatever hypocrites austerely talk
Of purity, and place, and innocence,
Defaming as impure what God declares
Pure, and commands to some, leaves free to all.
Our Maker bids increase; who bids abstain
But our destroyer, foe to God and Man?
Hail, wedded Love, mysterious law, true source
Of human offspring, sole propriety
In Paradise, of all things common else!
from Paradise Lost.
- Admonit
Yes, Ariel, there is no calculus for love.
The beauty of Christ's actions is that they are not destructive or deconstructive; rather, they are reconstructive, recreative.
You possess the truth about Real Love, and therefore you stand a good chance of making human love work. An excellent word.
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