The Desire for Love

Well. This is a weird topic for me, of all people. But Campus for Christ just hosted a discussion on the topic and why we (collectively as humans) need it. In my opinion the discussion wasn't brilliantly done in that the questions asked by the leader of the talk often revolved around the romantic side of love without explicitly stating as such. My group pretty consensually agreed that there were many different facets to it and what may be true in one case may not be in another.

As a side note, yes, the invitation to attend this discussion was opened campus-wide. It was not a purely Christian group. Which was a good thing.

The way the discussion was structured was that we would look at various forms of art and how they all speak of this idea of love, namely the internet, music, films, and literature. As I said already, these all were about the romantic form with the exception of literature (for which we looked at 1 Cor. 13; try discussing love in light of that with an atheist. It's not easy I can tell you that much).

Interestingly enough last week I attended the SOLA conference here in Montreal. Because I don't feel like describing it, google it. The point is that the speaker at said conference pointed out that in almost any country or rock song you'll find the singer complaining because they are so lonely or some ridiculous thing until they found “you” or “him/her”. This would indicate a nearly universal theme; that is, a desire for love. When we looked at music last night, the selected song was “Easier than Love” by Switchfoot. Basically, in the song the argument is made that we as a culture have a pretty horribly twisted and warped view of what love is. Having agreed back in the sixties that we all need to “feel the love”, the world today is now trying to figure out what “feel(ing) the love” really means. And judging from all the “sad” stories, the advice books, and such, I would hazard a guess we still don't really know what it means and that it is a pretty hard thing to do. In the song, Switchfoot makes the argument that we, as a culture, have made a backwards connection between sex and love. (Honestly this is getting weirder and weirder to write. But being my normal self at the discussion I made a grand total of one comment and do have things to say.) Now, as Christians we would believe that sex was created as a display of love between husband and wife, whereas now the culture as more or less reversed this and cheapened it to the point where it is supposedly equivalent to having love in your life. Plus, as Switchfoot claim, it's a lot easier than really loving someone. But why is that?

The reason is that we are pretty darn selfish people. 1 Cor. 13 explicitly states that love is not selfish. That's problem number one for us. To love someone you have to make sacrifices and give of yourself without expecting anything back. That, while being closely linked with my first statement, is still a major issue for us. It also takes commitment, something that a lot of people are scared of. Our culture's view is moving towards being “free”, something that is contradictory with the “tied down” nature of committing to really love someone.

I could probably go on about various aspects but I just wanted to get that out of my head so I don't have to think about it anymore. And no this isn't a sign of a change of view. I know, Chris...you were hopeful.