Notes from my Knapsack 9-23-21

Notes from my Knapsack 9-23-21

Jeff Gill

Fear divides us, love brings us together

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You can call it a cliche and I won't argue with you. Fear divides, love unites. Anxiety and worry and fear split us apart, while love and compassion and respect bring us together.

Why?

The cliche can be challenged. There are groups at work with mutually shared fears as their unifying force. Fear of others, fear of the unknown, fear of what they see as changing what's familiar for that which is different. Fear can, in truth, bring people together.

For a while.

My general impression is that coalitions of the anxious or the merely opposed tend to splinter and divide and fall apart. Maybe not until after they've done some damage, but fall apart they always do.

On the other hand, love is not the easiest way to create collaboration. You can put ten people in a room who all love the same thing: the Beatles, the Civil War, French cooking, and end up with fourteen factions or more. How to align love and loves for a common, shared purpose isn't as simple as shouting "Who loves broccoli salad? Come stand with me!"

Because immediately there's "but not with raisins!" Or the infamous "ramen noodle faction" tries to take over. Ewwww.

Love can also hold in tension a certain desire to remake the object of love, to improve on the ideal. Few of us are Olympian enough to love something on the order of statuary, where we love it exactly as it is and greet any change as a lessening of what we love, a reduction of love itself. We want to dust the sculpture, restore the paint, enhance the balance and the tone on the recording so it sounds even more lovely.

So it might be that the form of love which is a living thing, what we call a relationship in the modern terminology, that best speaks to the love which unites and connects. Not how we love a car or cottage, but loving a person. People in groups can be hard to love: the author James Joyce liked to observe that this was the great proof of the divinity of Jesus, that he looked upon the multitudes and loved them. He was an ironic guy, James Joyce (and usually called himself an agnostic at that), but he has a point. People in groups are often quite unloveable.

And the challenge of love, of a relationship over time, is that to love one person means we have to come to terms with what it means to love someone who loves us, the harshest mirror of all. If we harbor a dislike for ourselves, it can poison our love for someone who has chosen to love us. So we have to work on both at the same time, which is that living aspect of a relationship, the respiration and heartbeat of love, the back and forth of being in relation to each other.

To love is to know ourselves as loved, and back and forth it goes. To fear, and to cooperate with other fearful people, actually makes sense insofar as it appeals to our deepest doubts, usually about ourselves. So fear based collaboration works, but in the worst possible way. To work based on love can be scary, but the growth potential of that path is immense.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been in love with someone for forty years this week, and it's made him a better person. Tell him how love has helped you grow at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.