I love this book. I know it's been out for a while, but I'm just not getting around to really reading it. I'm on page 68 right now, and I ran across this quote that I thought was really interesting, if mostly irrelevant to her overall experiment. It's a great question worth considering:
"I can't help letting my mind wander to the implications of Alzheimer's disease to the immortal soul. Who wants an afterlife if the immediate pre-afterlife is spent clutching the arms of a wheelchair, head bent back at a forty-five degree angle, eyes and mouth wide open and equally mute, like so many of my charges at the Woodcrest [a nursing home facility where the author works on weekends]? Is the 'soul' that lives forever the one we possess at the moment of death, in which case heaven must look something like the Woodcrest, with plenty of CNAs and dietary aides to take care of those who died in a state of mental decomposition? Or is it our personally best soul -- say, the one that indwells in us at the height of our cognitive powers and moral aspirations? In which case, it can't possibly matter whether demented [that is, patients suffering from dementia] diabetics eat cupcakes or not, because from a purely soteriological standpoint, they're already dead."
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
eat pray love
I am the Queen of Long Blog Posts.
So I started this blog with the intention of writing about books I liked. Then I realized that no one really cared what I thought about books but did care about what I was doing in England and were a little interested in what I was thinking, so I blogged about that. Now we're back to books.
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert is amazing. I loved reading it. This book was referenced pretty constantly in the American autobiography course I took this past Spring, but I never had time to read more than the first few pages. I liked it then, but couldn't quite get back to it. A dear friend of mine has recently read it, though, and loved it, and that motivated me to really read it. So I did, and it's great. A warning for people in my church book club: the last 50 pages or so might make a few of you uncomfortable. But I still loved it.
I have long been fascinated by the spiritual journey people who consciously seek out God take. I don't honestly consider myself a seeker in that way. I feel like I've known God my whole life and that as the years progress, I just get to know Him to better and more thoroughly, like with any friendship. (Though, obviously, I'm a pretty terrible friend.) Or maybe, being an academic, meeting God like school to me. You complete one grade and then move on to the next, picking up more knowledge as you go. Kindergartners don't need to worry about not knowing how to do calculus yet. When the time is right, they'll get to learn it. I'm probably still in God Preschool, but I have confidence that eventually I'll get to junior high. :) I also feel that I'm very blessed to have started out in a family so familiar with God to begin with. I am way to lazy to have sought Him out on my own.
Anyway, with that in mind, I absolutely love reading well-written spiritual memoir. Girl Meets God is a favorite of mine, but I like Eat Pray Love for totally different reasons. Maybe it isn't even fair to call it spiritual memoir. Maybe it's a post-divorce memoir. Maybe it's a travelogue. Whatever it is, Gilbert is able to lay all her mess on the table and then to reconstruct it into this lovely and true mosaic for her readers, to show how the mess has meaning. She's a much braver writer than I could ever be. Also, as a composition teacher, I can't help but admire the way she crafts a paragraph.
This book honestly speaks best for itself. It is divided into three places: Italy ("eat"), India ("pray"), and Indonesia/Bali ("love"). I am not including any quotes from the Italy section because 1. I loved the whole section and 2. The words don't seem to stand as well out of context. I will agree with Gilbert, though, that Italian is a language that is only beautiful- la piu bella lingua nel mondo in truth. I loved reading about her time there because she included so much Italian. It was like becoming reacquainted with an old friend. Anyhow, just because I'm not including quotes from the Italy section doesn't mean it wasn't awesome. It was.
Here are some other quotes:
p. 175 "The search for God is a reversal of the normal, mindane worldly order. In the search for God, you revert from what attracts you and swim toward that which is difficult. You abandon your comforting and familiar habits with the hope (the mere hope!) that something greater will be offered you in return for what you've given up. . . . We all agree that it would be easier to sleep in , and many of us do, but for millennia there have been others who choose instead to get up before the sun and wash their faces and go to their prayers. And then fircely try to hold on to their devotional convictions throughout the lunacy of another day."
p. 177 "Prayer is a relationship; half the job is mind. If I want transformation, but can't even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I'm aiming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don't have this, all your please and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift. . . . If I don't feel sincere [when I pray], then I wills tay there on the floor until i do.. What worked yesterday doesn't always work today. Prayers can become stale and drone into the boring and familiar if you let your attention stagnate. In making an effort to stay alert, I am assuming custodial responsibility for the maintenance of my own soul."
p. 192 "We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, dramatic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality. . . . Constantly [Swamiji] was teaching that austerity and renunciation -- just for their own sake -- are not what you need. To know God, you need only to renounce one thing -- your sense of division from God. Otherwise, just stay as you were made, within your natural character."
p. 207 "What I'm seeing in some of my friends, though, as they are aging, is a longing to have something to believe in. But this longing chages against any number of obstacles, including their intellect and common sense. Despite all their intellect, though, these people still live in a world that careens about in a series of wild and devastating and completely nonsensical lurches. Great and horrible experiences of either suffering or joy occur in the lives of all these people, just as with the rest of us, and these mega-experiences tend to make us long for a spiritual context in which to express either lament or gratitude, or to seek understanding. the problem is -- what to worship, whom to pray to?"
p. 260 "She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will amybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and somethimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlylessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effot to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't, you will leak away your innate contenement. It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments."
p. 271 "'Why does suffering never end?' Wayan asked. She wasn't crying, merely posing a simple, unanswerable question. 'why must everything be repeat and repeat, never finish, never resting? You work so hard one day, but the next day, you must only work again. You eat, but the next day, you are already hungry. You find love, then love go away. You are born with nothing -- no watch, no T-shirt. You are young, then you are old. No matter how hard you work, you cannot stop getting old.'"
p. 276-7 "Only the young and stupid are confident about sex and romance. Do you think any of us know what we're doing? Do you think there's any way humans can love each other without complication? . . . It's still two human beings trying to get along, so it's going to become complicated. And love is always complicated. But still humans must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken soemtimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something."
p. 286 "I have given myself away in love many times, merely for the sake of love. And I've given away the farm soemtimes in that process. If I am to truly become an autonomous woman, then I must take over that role of being my own guardian."
p. 318 "The baby looked up, looked around, smiled. She wasn't a god anymore. She didn't seem to mind. She wasn't fearful at all. She seemed thoroughly satisfied with every decision she had ever made."
p. 325 "The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure. . . I'm lonely . . . I'm a failure . . . I'm lonely. . .) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras."
p. 328 "I knew then that this is how God loves us all and receives us all . . . . Because if one broken and limited human being could experience even one such episode of absolute forgiveness and acceptance of her won self, then imagine -- just imagine!-- what God, in all His eternal compassion, can forgive and accept."
p. 329 -30 "[The Zen Buddhists] say that an oak tree is brought into creation by two forces at the same time. Obviously, there is the acorn from which it all begins, the seed which holds all the promise and potential, which grows into the tree. Everybody can see that. But only a few can recognize that there is another force operating here as well-- the future tree itself, which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being, drawing the seedling forth with longing out of the void, guiding the evolution from nothingness to maturity. In this respect, say the Zens, it is the oak tree that creates the very acorn from which it was born.
"I think about the woman I have become lately, about the life that I am now living, and about how much I always wanted to be this person and live this life, liberated from the farce of pretending to be anyone other than myself. I think of everything I endured before getting ehre and wonder if it was me . . . who pulled the other, younger, more confused and more struggling me forward during all those hard years."
So I started this blog with the intention of writing about books I liked. Then I realized that no one really cared what I thought about books but did care about what I was doing in England and were a little interested in what I was thinking, so I blogged about that. Now we're back to books.
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert is amazing. I loved reading it. This book was referenced pretty constantly in the American autobiography course I took this past Spring, but I never had time to read more than the first few pages. I liked it then, but couldn't quite get back to it. A dear friend of mine has recently read it, though, and loved it, and that motivated me to really read it. So I did, and it's great. A warning for people in my church book club: the last 50 pages or so might make a few of you uncomfortable. But I still loved it.
I have long been fascinated by the spiritual journey people who consciously seek out God take. I don't honestly consider myself a seeker in that way. I feel like I've known God my whole life and that as the years progress, I just get to know Him to better and more thoroughly, like with any friendship. (Though, obviously, I'm a pretty terrible friend.) Or maybe, being an academic, meeting God like school to me. You complete one grade and then move on to the next, picking up more knowledge as you go. Kindergartners don't need to worry about not knowing how to do calculus yet. When the time is right, they'll get to learn it. I'm probably still in God Preschool, but I have confidence that eventually I'll get to junior high. :) I also feel that I'm very blessed to have started out in a family so familiar with God to begin with. I am way to lazy to have sought Him out on my own.
Anyway, with that in mind, I absolutely love reading well-written spiritual memoir. Girl Meets God is a favorite of mine, but I like Eat Pray Love for totally different reasons. Maybe it isn't even fair to call it spiritual memoir. Maybe it's a post-divorce memoir. Maybe it's a travelogue. Whatever it is, Gilbert is able to lay all her mess on the table and then to reconstruct it into this lovely and true mosaic for her readers, to show how the mess has meaning. She's a much braver writer than I could ever be. Also, as a composition teacher, I can't help but admire the way she crafts a paragraph.
This book honestly speaks best for itself. It is divided into three places: Italy ("eat"), India ("pray"), and Indonesia/Bali ("love"). I am not including any quotes from the Italy section because 1. I loved the whole section and 2. The words don't seem to stand as well out of context. I will agree with Gilbert, though, that Italian is a language that is only beautiful- la piu bella lingua nel mondo in truth. I loved reading about her time there because she included so much Italian. It was like becoming reacquainted with an old friend. Anyhow, just because I'm not including quotes from the Italy section doesn't mean it wasn't awesome. It was.
Here are some other quotes:
p. 175 "The search for God is a reversal of the normal, mindane worldly order. In the search for God, you revert from what attracts you and swim toward that which is difficult. You abandon your comforting and familiar habits with the hope (the mere hope!) that something greater will be offered you in return for what you've given up. . . . We all agree that it would be easier to sleep in , and many of us do, but for millennia there have been others who choose instead to get up before the sun and wash their faces and go to their prayers. And then fircely try to hold on to their devotional convictions throughout the lunacy of another day."
p. 177 "Prayer is a relationship; half the job is mind. If I want transformation, but can't even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I'm aiming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don't have this, all your please and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift. . . . If I don't feel sincere [when I pray], then I wills tay there on the floor until i do.. What worked yesterday doesn't always work today. Prayers can become stale and drone into the boring and familiar if you let your attention stagnate. In making an effort to stay alert, I am assuming custodial responsibility for the maintenance of my own soul."
p. 192 "We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, dramatic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality. . . . Constantly [Swamiji] was teaching that austerity and renunciation -- just for their own sake -- are not what you need. To know God, you need only to renounce one thing -- your sense of division from God. Otherwise, just stay as you were made, within your natural character."
p. 207 "What I'm seeing in some of my friends, though, as they are aging, is a longing to have something to believe in. But this longing chages against any number of obstacles, including their intellect and common sense. Despite all their intellect, though, these people still live in a world that careens about in a series of wild and devastating and completely nonsensical lurches. Great and horrible experiences of either suffering or joy occur in the lives of all these people, just as with the rest of us, and these mega-experiences tend to make us long for a spiritual context in which to express either lament or gratitude, or to seek understanding. the problem is -- what to worship, whom to pray to?"
p. 260 "She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will amybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and somethimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlylessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effot to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't, you will leak away your innate contenement. It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments."
p. 271 "'Why does suffering never end?' Wayan asked. She wasn't crying, merely posing a simple, unanswerable question. 'why must everything be repeat and repeat, never finish, never resting? You work so hard one day, but the next day, you must only work again. You eat, but the next day, you are already hungry. You find love, then love go away. You are born with nothing -- no watch, no T-shirt. You are young, then you are old. No matter how hard you work, you cannot stop getting old.'"
p. 276-7 "Only the young and stupid are confident about sex and romance. Do you think any of us know what we're doing? Do you think there's any way humans can love each other without complication? . . . It's still two human beings trying to get along, so it's going to become complicated. And love is always complicated. But still humans must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken soemtimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something."
p. 286 "I have given myself away in love many times, merely for the sake of love. And I've given away the farm soemtimes in that process. If I am to truly become an autonomous woman, then I must take over that role of being my own guardian."
p. 318 "The baby looked up, looked around, smiled. She wasn't a god anymore. She didn't seem to mind. She wasn't fearful at all. She seemed thoroughly satisfied with every decision she had ever made."
p. 325 "The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure. . . I'm lonely . . . I'm a failure . . . I'm lonely. . .) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras."
p. 328 "I knew then that this is how God loves us all and receives us all . . . . Because if one broken and limited human being could experience even one such episode of absolute forgiveness and acceptance of her won self, then imagine -- just imagine!-- what God, in all His eternal compassion, can forgive and accept."
p. 329 -30 "[The Zen Buddhists] say that an oak tree is brought into creation by two forces at the same time. Obviously, there is the acorn from which it all begins, the seed which holds all the promise and potential, which grows into the tree. Everybody can see that. But only a few can recognize that there is another force operating here as well-- the future tree itself, which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being, drawing the seedling forth with longing out of the void, guiding the evolution from nothingness to maturity. In this respect, say the Zens, it is the oak tree that creates the very acorn from which it was born.
"I think about the woman I have become lately, about the life that I am now living, and about how much I always wanted to be this person and live this life, liberated from the farce of pretending to be anyone other than myself. I think of everything I endured before getting ehre and wonder if it was me . . . who pulled the other, younger, more confused and more struggling me forward during all those hard years."
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Unoriginal Thoughts on Love
I have resisted writing this particular post for a very long time. I think American (n.b. when I use the term "American," I'm referring to the United States, and I'm only using the term American because I am one and it's what I know. The things I label as true for America could very well be true for Samoa as well, but how would I know?) advertising has made love banal as an idea and that contemporary academic cynicism has made it impossible to feel sincerely. Since my feelings are (to me) neither banal nor fake, I don't want them to be interpreted that way, but I question my ability to express them any other way. I've tried to avoid the issue by, well, avoiding the issue. Also, I'm still pretty muddled about what I think, so all these declaratives below are really more like thoughts that I'm pretty sure about, but could be persuaded to think differently on. So here are the four things I think about love right now: 1. There is not enough language to describe all the kinds of love there are in the world. 2. Love is not a thing-- so it can't be "given" or "deserved." 3. Loving is hard. The beauty of a romance comes from overcoming obstacles, not from the total absence of obstacles. We cheer for the eucatastrophe. We're bored when nothing happens. 4. Love is an honorable risk. I know that better, more poetic, minds than mine have covered this before, but goshdarnit, this is the Age of Information and this my blog, so I can say what I think about love here. Shakespeare can get his own blog.
First, I think we're faced with lingusitic failure when it comes to describing some things. This shows up most tragically, in my opinion, in many spiritual autobiographies and in terrible, terrible Christian fiction. John may have been able to encode Christ and his workings (John 1:1), but very few writers outside of scripture have similar capabilities. A finite, mortal mind cannot comprehend the totality of Deity (making an exception for the inspired), so how could it express it? We can come close, but cannot express the whole picture. Maybe I'm just a child of postmodernism, but at some point, language just breaks down. Some things are beyond expression.
For me, love is this way. I tell my husband regularly that I love him, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't know what he means to me. I mean, he knows he's important to me and that I like him better than anyone else and that I plan on doing that forever, but there's a lot involved in my love for him that "I love you" doesn't catch. My personal history, my romantic history, and my current mood all weight and shade those three little words a certain way. Every time I say "I love you," I can't say "Thanks for laughing at that Wedge Antilles joke I told before we were dating that no one else caught." I can't say "Thanks for getting me a new car and not being mad when I wrecked my old one and thought I was going to die." I can't say "Thanks for not being emotionally or sexually abusive." I can't say "Thanks for putting clean towels in the bathroom." You get the general idea. I can't say all these things every single time I say "I love you," but all of those things (and more!) are what I'm feeling when I say "I love you." And that's just when I say it to my husband.
There just aren't enough words in English to describe every kind of affectionate relationship (nor are there in Greek, either, though Biblical scholars might lead you to believe so). Part of me wonders whether this Prop 8 issue isn't partly linguistic in origin. Lots of people who voted for Prop 8 also voted for an expansion of domestic partnership rights in previous years. It seems that some heterosexual couples engaged in a legal contract just aren't comfortable using the same word that describes their relationship to describe a relationship between homosexual copules engaged in almost the same social contract (the word I'm referring to is, obviously, "marriage"). If supporters of Prop 8 feel that there is a real difference between heterosexual and homosexual couples, maybe they should be supporting new words to describe these relationships more accurately. And what about relationships that fall outside hetero/homsexual lines? I have a friend-who-is-a-female with whom I hope to grow old and happy, but we're not interested in each other sexually. She's more than my best friend and she's not a girlfriend. We're plenty physically affectionate, but again, not sexually. What word describes our relationship? What about close male relationships outside of family bonds? What about specific family members that you're close to? There should be a verb to describe the way you feel about the aunt you went shopping for prom dresses with and another verb to describe how you feel about the grandmother you only saw once before she died when you were three, but who you've heard a lot of stories about and feel positively towards. We just don't have these words. "Love" has to pull extra shifts to cover these gaps in our language.
Of course, even if we did have words in our language to cover that range of relationships, we still wouldn't be able to express ourselves all that accurately. De Saussure insists (and I believe him) that there is a difference in the word for a thing and the thing itself. Hence we have as many words for "tree" as there are languages, and yet they all refer to tree. The word describing the thing itself is arbitrarily chosen and irrelevant, mostly-- it just matters that we know what "tree" means when we hear it. There's this gap, though, where there's room for me to imagine either a teensy mesquite bush or stately sequoia when someone says "tree." Even if we use more specific language, say "sequoia," that gap remains. So, in some sense, I can never tell my husband how much I love him.
Because of this linguistic miasma (a.k.a. "play," thank-you Derrida), we get tricked into thinking all kinds of things about love. One of the things that I run into most often that I don't agree with is that love is something people can deserve. I'm not sure if it's the Christian or the cynic in me, but if we only loved people who "deserved" it, then no one would have any love. Every single person I know has let me down at some point. Nobody's perfect. This doesn't mean that they're bad people-- they're all very good people!-- it just means that they are People. Futhermore, the scriptures (an authority on love to me) don't say "Love the people who treat you nicely and give you compliments all the time and hook you up with a good job and a fancy car and think the same whay you think." The scriptures say that we should love our neighbors as ourselves (Luke 10:2&) and (if we believe The Book of Matthew, and I do) that we should love our enemies, bless those that curse us, do good to those who hate us, and pray for those who despitefully use you and persecute us. Do those sound like people who deserve to be loved? And yet this is what we (Christians) are called to do. If we were better at it, there'd be a lot less conflict in the world. My point is, no one deserves to be loved, so that shouldn't be a reason why we love. We should love because it's good for us, just like we should eat vegetables instead of potato chips because it's good for us. It's a choice we make and need to continue to make.
I don't think we need to make ourselves doormats, though. I think "forgiveness" is such a wonderful principle because it allows us to recognize that we've been wronged while giving us a way to move forward in love. When I can forgive my ex-husband (and in some moods I can't, though those are rarer now), I'm able to say "You were such a jerk to me" and I'm able to have compassion (a kind of love) for his situation. That doesn't mean I'll ever trust him again, but it means I can move on without rancor. It's possible to recognize that someone is harmful and still love them.
True love, in my mind, can't exist without forgiveness. Forgiveness is hard, but so is love generally. I really like what C.S. Lewis says in The Weight of Glory, "Our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner -- no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your sense." Love is a difficult thing. Is it any wonder that Mormons advocate eternal marriage? It seems to me that it would take an eternity to work out living in that tension of having on the one hand "deep feeling for the sins," or an awareness of the many, many ways in which we've been wronged and on the other, "we love the sinner." Forgive, forgive, forgive, so that we can love.
In that same passage, Lewis also declares that "there are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilation -- these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit -- immortal horrors or everlasting splendours." This eternal perspective is what makes love worth it to me. I move an awful, awful lot and am terribly shy. Sometimes it seems like even making friends is not worth the effort when I know that as soon as I move, they won't be willing to put out the effort required to maintain long-distance friendships. Still, I feel certain that at the end of all things, the effort we put into our relationships with others comes back to us. Is there any greater adventure than love? Death is the only thing I can think of that might come close. I think loving is an essential part of living fully. If that means getting hurt (terribly, terribly hurt) sometimes, I still say it's worth it. Love is always an experiment. I have very loving relationships with many people and I've had terrifying, destructive relationships, so I feel qualified to say that the work I put into nurturing these relationships and the risk I take in making myself vulnerable to them has been worth the trouble. When I love, I know that I am alive. When I love, I know that I am human. When I love, I know that I am not alone.
This is a really long post. I'm struggling against ineffability here. Tell me what you think. I'm willing to be wrong.
First, I think we're faced with lingusitic failure when it comes to describing some things. This shows up most tragically, in my opinion, in many spiritual autobiographies and in terrible, terrible Christian fiction. John may have been able to encode Christ and his workings (John 1:1), but very few writers outside of scripture have similar capabilities. A finite, mortal mind cannot comprehend the totality of Deity (making an exception for the inspired), so how could it express it? We can come close, but cannot express the whole picture. Maybe I'm just a child of postmodernism, but at some point, language just breaks down. Some things are beyond expression.
For me, love is this way. I tell my husband regularly that I love him, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't know what he means to me. I mean, he knows he's important to me and that I like him better than anyone else and that I plan on doing that forever, but there's a lot involved in my love for him that "I love you" doesn't catch. My personal history, my romantic history, and my current mood all weight and shade those three little words a certain way. Every time I say "I love you," I can't say "Thanks for laughing at that Wedge Antilles joke I told before we were dating that no one else caught." I can't say "Thanks for getting me a new car and not being mad when I wrecked my old one and thought I was going to die." I can't say "Thanks for not being emotionally or sexually abusive." I can't say "Thanks for putting clean towels in the bathroom." You get the general idea. I can't say all these things every single time I say "I love you," but all of those things (and more!) are what I'm feeling when I say "I love you." And that's just when I say it to my husband.
There just aren't enough words in English to describe every kind of affectionate relationship (nor are there in Greek, either, though Biblical scholars might lead you to believe so). Part of me wonders whether this Prop 8 issue isn't partly linguistic in origin. Lots of people who voted for Prop 8 also voted for an expansion of domestic partnership rights in previous years. It seems that some heterosexual couples engaged in a legal contract just aren't comfortable using the same word that describes their relationship to describe a relationship between homosexual copules engaged in almost the same social contract (the word I'm referring to is, obviously, "marriage"). If supporters of Prop 8 feel that there is a real difference between heterosexual and homosexual couples, maybe they should be supporting new words to describe these relationships more accurately. And what about relationships that fall outside hetero/homsexual lines? I have a friend-who-is-a-female with whom I hope to grow old and happy, but we're not interested in each other sexually. She's more than my best friend and she's not a girlfriend. We're plenty physically affectionate, but again, not sexually. What word describes our relationship? What about close male relationships outside of family bonds? What about specific family members that you're close to? There should be a verb to describe the way you feel about the aunt you went shopping for prom dresses with and another verb to describe how you feel about the grandmother you only saw once before she died when you were three, but who you've heard a lot of stories about and feel positively towards. We just don't have these words. "Love" has to pull extra shifts to cover these gaps in our language.
Of course, even if we did have words in our language to cover that range of relationships, we still wouldn't be able to express ourselves all that accurately. De Saussure insists (and I believe him) that there is a difference in the word for a thing and the thing itself. Hence we have as many words for "tree" as there are languages, and yet they all refer to tree. The word describing the thing itself is arbitrarily chosen and irrelevant, mostly-- it just matters that we know what "tree" means when we hear it. There's this gap, though, where there's room for me to imagine either a teensy mesquite bush or stately sequoia when someone says "tree." Even if we use more specific language, say "sequoia," that gap remains. So, in some sense, I can never tell my husband how much I love him.
Because of this linguistic miasma (a.k.a. "play," thank-you Derrida), we get tricked into thinking all kinds of things about love. One of the things that I run into most often that I don't agree with is that love is something people can deserve. I'm not sure if it's the Christian or the cynic in me, but if we only loved people who "deserved" it, then no one would have any love. Every single person I know has let me down at some point. Nobody's perfect. This doesn't mean that they're bad people-- they're all very good people!-- it just means that they are People. Futhermore, the scriptures (an authority on love to me) don't say "Love the people who treat you nicely and give you compliments all the time and hook you up with a good job and a fancy car and think the same whay you think." The scriptures say that we should love our neighbors as ourselves (Luke 10:2&) and (if we believe The Book of Matthew, and I do) that we should love our enemies, bless those that curse us, do good to those who hate us, and pray for those who despitefully use you and persecute us. Do those sound like people who deserve to be loved? And yet this is what we (Christians) are called to do. If we were better at it, there'd be a lot less conflict in the world. My point is, no one deserves to be loved, so that shouldn't be a reason why we love. We should love because it's good for us, just like we should eat vegetables instead of potato chips because it's good for us. It's a choice we make and need to continue to make.
I don't think we need to make ourselves doormats, though. I think "forgiveness" is such a wonderful principle because it allows us to recognize that we've been wronged while giving us a way to move forward in love. When I can forgive my ex-husband (and in some moods I can't, though those are rarer now), I'm able to say "You were such a jerk to me" and I'm able to have compassion (a kind of love) for his situation. That doesn't mean I'll ever trust him again, but it means I can move on without rancor. It's possible to recognize that someone is harmful and still love them.
True love, in my mind, can't exist without forgiveness. Forgiveness is hard, but so is love generally. I really like what C.S. Lewis says in The Weight of Glory, "Our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner -- no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your sense." Love is a difficult thing. Is it any wonder that Mormons advocate eternal marriage? It seems to me that it would take an eternity to work out living in that tension of having on the one hand "deep feeling for the sins," or an awareness of the many, many ways in which we've been wronged and on the other, "we love the sinner." Forgive, forgive, forgive, so that we can love.
In that same passage, Lewis also declares that "there are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilation -- these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit -- immortal horrors or everlasting splendours." This eternal perspective is what makes love worth it to me. I move an awful, awful lot and am terribly shy. Sometimes it seems like even making friends is not worth the effort when I know that as soon as I move, they won't be willing to put out the effort required to maintain long-distance friendships. Still, I feel certain that at the end of all things, the effort we put into our relationships with others comes back to us. Is there any greater adventure than love? Death is the only thing I can think of that might come close. I think loving is an essential part of living fully. If that means getting hurt (terribly, terribly hurt) sometimes, I still say it's worth it. Love is always an experiment. I have very loving relationships with many people and I've had terrifying, destructive relationships, so I feel qualified to say that the work I put into nurturing these relationships and the risk I take in making myself vulnerable to them has been worth the trouble. When I love, I know that I am alive. When I love, I know that I am human. When I love, I know that I am not alone.
This is a really long post. I'm struggling against ineffability here. Tell me what you think. I'm willing to be wrong.
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