Thurs Jan. 5 - Love, Love, Love (The Mountain Goats)

One of the more popular of recent years' holiday films has been Love Actually, with its celebrations and reflections on the bitter and the sweet of earthly love in all its forms: family, romantic, friendship and more.  The general message, neatly packaged, is this: earthly love is messy, beautiful, complicated, painful, risky, self-contradicting- deeply imperfect, but somehow, sometimes, worth it.

Today's song takes the same idea, but to a much darker place.  As this song points out, the melody we're singing might be 'love, love, love,' but some terrible, brutal things are done in the twisted forms of love we foster in our lives, and the echoing of those actions can haunt us.

This could just be some morose anti-Christmas cheer reflection on human fallenness and depravity, but I hear something else: I hear God's pity and God's grace, too.  I hear Jesus coming as an infant, acting and speaking as a man about 'love, love, love' (echoing Dave Matthews 'love is all around' refrain from our Christmas Eve post) and having all of us so woefully, tragically, and almost willfully misunderstand him for two thousand years -- and yet and still offering us a love which is so wildly boundless, so graciously vulnerable, so passionately freedom-seeking that we can barely turn toward and believe it.

I received an emailed image tonight that sums up pretty well where I think we as Christians have twisted and mangled the idea of love, and especially Christ's love, back in on itself in so many ways (HERE).  How can we hear this song as not only as a call to own our own broken witness to Jesus' love, but as an invitation to remember the Source of that love and the ways in which, as the song reminds us, 'now we see this / as in a mirror dimly, / then we shall see each other / face to face' ?

Love, Love, Love by The Mountain Goats (lyrics HERE)

The line about seeing 'in a mirror dimly' is borrowed from 1 Corinthians 13, slightly after the famous passage on love popular at marriages, which, if we read carefully, is less about romantic love and more about the kind of love which Jesus modeled in his relations with us: the love of enemy and outcast, neighbor and friend, sinner and saint alike.

If I speak in the tongues of humans or angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  

Love never ends.

                                        - 1 Corinthians 13: 1-8a

May we continue to hear God's 'Christmas' song of 'love, love, love' in ways that bring life and wholeness, but also remember God's pity and grace for where we have erred.