By Sr. Organza Pettingfield
Christians and the non-denominational crowd absolutely go ga-ga over St. Paul’s first reading to the Corinthians. It’s often called his Hymn to Love. Everyone knows it. Love is patient. Love is kind. Blah blah blah. He goes on a bit about what love isn’t and ends with the flourish that love remains when everything else is gone. It is a lovely reading and for those of us who find St. Paul to be, how does one say, a tad misogynistic, it’s one of his better letters. But even after all of that, I am not so sure St. Paul went far enough or really nailed down (ooh bad pun) the concept of what love is and how it moves among us. While St. Paul’s idea of love looks great on a plaque hanging in Joni Ernst’s living room where it gathers dust as I am not sure she knows was being a Christian is, I believe it is much much bigger.
God, the Universe, creation, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, has given each one of its creations endless opportunities for love. Humans are confronted daily with virtually unlimited moments to execute our duty to love while on earth. If you’re married, or partnered, or throupled or whatever the hell kind of relationship you’re in, from the moment you wake up- you have someone to love and hopefully, someone who will reciprocate that love. Parents? Have their children and children, their parents. I could discuss every familial relationship ad infinitum, but you get my point.
If family is not your thing because your family is toxic, dysfunctional, crazy, or inbred, fear not! God has also given us animals and plants to love. Dogs, cats, parakeets, goldfish, hamsters, rabbits, orchids, fiddle leaf figs, spider plants. Yes. You can absolutely love something that, to your limited human perception, does not seem to always love you back. The very undertaking of caring for these vulnerable creations is a profound act of selfless love.
When we talk about love, we think hearts and kisses and hugs. We think of those weird chalk hearts we eat during Valentine’s Day. We think of saying the words, “I love you.” We think of a diapered winged baby shooting little arrows out of his quiver. Love is not a word. It isn’t Cupid. Love is transcendent. It’s creative. It’s transformative. I’m aging myself, but years ago there was a song that featured the lyrics, “making love out of nothing at all.” Scientists and really anyone who questions the creation story as laid out in Genesis are baffled by the idea of creatio ex nihilo (the creation of everything from nothing). But to those who do believe in something greater than themselves, making something from nothing should be a rather easy concept. God itself loved the universe into being. While God’s thought process may be the shape and form of that universe- it was not the catalyst or rather the beginning of that universe.
Love was there at the beginning. This first profound act of love echoes still and reverberates off every star, every planet, and every black hole. Loving the universe into being means that attached to each atom, there exists a part of that divine love.
Love is an act of willful desire for the good and vitality of something or someone other than oneself without any thought of repayment in any way. What does something that has no need of anything expect from its creations? Nothing. God has no expectations from its massive multiverse. It is solely there for the delight of its creations. This is true from God down to the tiniest measurable particle. God needs nothing. If you believe he does, then your God is indeed a weak and frail one.
God creates the universe. Within this universe are countless wonders – like nebulae. This resonance of that first act of love, these clouds of super-heated gas create stars, much like our own. And then the residual material that surround them coalesce into planets. Some planets like Neptune or Jupiter offer no distinct biological life. But biological life is not needed for love to be present or expressed.
Occasionally, a star will get a planet like earth brimming with the potential for life. Earth in turn begets land and sky and sea and eventually plants and animals. Each of those offer opportunities for love. A tree, say an apple tree, brings forth flowers every summer. Those flowers provide vital food for bees and hummingbirds who then pollinate that flower. The flower withers and dies to become an apple which is then food for people, or horses, or whatever wants to eat them. Keep this in mind, the apple tree is putting forth its apples with no expectation of return from anything that it feeds. An endless cycle of love and that’s just for apples. Don’t me started on grapes or potatoes which bring forth vodka, which in turn begets Cosmopolitans which in turns leads to a chastising email from The Abbot after the office Christmas party.
Though it may seem ridiculous that a tree can love us, our understanding of the universe and the creations within it is limited to our senses and to those instruments we have invented to augment them. Until fairly recently, we had no idea what a bacterium was. If you had told a person living in the 1300s that the plague was caused by a tiny, nearly invisible, organism, rather than sin, they would have thought you were possessed and burned you at a stake. So why is it inconceivable today that there still exist characteristics of our own world that are there but are not yet observable? The truth is our short lives and shortsightedness into our future as a species mean we have limited vision. We know very little about this magnificent universe.
I am not suggesting we come up with a love-scope. (But what an amazing band name.) Love is not a thing. What I am suggesting is that we do not know if there are other forms of communication among the other things within our universe that we simply cannot hear. Within the last several decades, we didn’t realize that elephants and hippos can communicate, or talk really, over vast distances using subsonic sounds. (Usually this is unfounded gossip about one another.) These are sounds with waves so large that we cannot hear them. Also, why does communication need to be sound alone. I can give my best girlfriend one eyebrow raise and she knows exactly what the hell I am talking about. (Girl, did you see that? Is he wearing a toupee?) The point is, we can never be 100% sure that we have not only observed but also completely understood all forms of communication that exist on earth. And because we cannot understand all forms of communication, we really have no way of knowing if a tree wishes us well, or tells us to fuck off, or is appalled by what we’re wearing. Or what’s to say the moon or a rock or a mountain can’t also “speak”? Couldn’t the moon desire something nice for something else? What if we learned that our moon shone simply for the delight of humankind? Now our universe becomes fully alive with love.
In a way, humans are the only known creation thus far that can perform an act without involving the broader understanding of love. These include the entire array of negative emotions with their corresponding negative actions. Hatred is not only the opposite of love, but also an anti-matter anomaly directly opposed to the underlying will of the universe. People who hate are unnatural aberrations – freaks who seek to undermine God’s creation. So, when conservative “Christians” speak of measures to oppress, repress or destroy LGBTQ folks, or liberals or whatever group they take illogical and unnecessary umbrage with that month, they are acting in direct opposition to God itself. The unnatural creatures here are not gay men, lesbian women, transwomen, transmen, queer folk – they are arrogant, unloving, blasphemous, and – dare I say it- heretical Christians and other religious like them who out of a lazy understanding of their faith have chosen to hate by permission of their limited vision of what/who/where/how God is. And the heartbreaking thing is that it does not have to be this way. Hatred is futile and will, in the end, be consumed by love.
Sorry St. Paul. Love not only remains. It is truly all that there is.
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