Thought for the week: Noël Staples’ four-letter word
‘Revealing love for the first time makes us vulnerable, requiring trust that the recipient might love back.’
Love: there is probably no more difficult word to define. My 1979 Oxford English Dictionary devotes four pages to it, before loveache, loveage and love-apple, ending with lovingness. The well-known song tells us that it is ‘a many splendored thing… nature’s way of giving a reason to be living’.
In ministry recently I tried to say something about vulnerability and trust, in relation to it. I used Robert Burns’ lovely mouse description: ‘Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie’ to describe what we all have inside us – that which wants, needs, to be loved, but needs protection from ‘the cruel coulter[s]’ of the world outside. I spoke of the dread of rejection when first one dares to reveal one’s love to another person. Revealing love for the first time makes us vulnerable, requiring trust that the recipient might love back – or, at least, not be evilly disposed (William Blake captured this riskiness well in ‘Never seek to tell thy love’).
When we humans love other humans there is a beloved to see and be with, someone whose actions in relation to us can be interpreted. We have someone tangible to experience, which gives us as basis for trust. But what about God, or the spirit, the light? These have a presence we can experience, but it dances around the edge of our senses and – frustratingly or even infuriatingly – seems to peep from the interstices of our perceptions. What do I mean when I say out loud, as I sometimes do, ‘I love you God’? If we say, anthropomorphically, ‘God loves us’, we attribute human feelings to something beyond human understanding. This is contradictory. If someone says ‘God is this’ or ‘God wants that’ I suggest you run for your life! But, if someone tries to say how they respond to their sense of God or the spirit, listen gently, honoured by their trust.
George Fox said that: ‘Thus when God doth work, who shall let it? And this I knew experimentally.’ In his 2013 Swarthmore Lecture Gerald Hewitson spoke of experiencing ‘love cascading through the universe’. In both cases it is human experiences being described. These are two humans describing their responses to the promptings of something beyond comprehension, but which feels real.
More significantly, what do you or I mean by love? It’s well worth pondering this before tackling the problematic love of God, or what we mean by ‘God is love’. Indeed, it may be best if we stick to trying to describe the ways in which we are responding when we feel loved, and to be careful before we try to attribute the cause of those responses to others. We should be yet more careful before attributing the cause of our feelings to something transcendent, or immanent, or both. Ultimately, we must leap off the spiritual cliff, trusting that we will be upheld.
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