Letting love lead the way

By Brian Henderson 

As I sat in a local piano bar one evening, the lyrics of a jazz piece being played over the stereo system struck me as being apropos: “Love is funny. Love is real. Love is heartache.” The universe spoke to me before I could speak my words into print. Love. What is love? How many ways can it be expressed? Isn’t love funny? Real? And too often heartache?

Understanding or grasping the deep and wide spectrum of love is like trying to single out just one star in the Milky Way. However many times we try to capture its beauty, one hundred other stars grab our attention. What is love? Doesn’t it often seem to elude us? We want it. We dream of it. Sometimes we taste it. And then just when we think we’ve swooped it up into our hearts it slips away leaving us with nagging questions and empty feelings.

What is love? Christian evangelist Paul in his letter to the Corinthians said: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

Is this love? Might this be that for which we all long?

Sometimes I wonder if we don’t give enough thought to love’s deeper roots and the stabilizing force it seeks to be.

Sometimes I wonder if love is like a magic potion that will quickly and instantly transform our fantasies and dreams into a reality that is everything but real. Don’t get me wrong. “Love” as we want it to be can often have such a soporific effect. In our attempt to capture what we so desperately want and need, we fall asleep to what love really is and means.

Love can move the soul. Love can heal our wounds. Love brings hope and vitality to the otherwise void spaces of our lives.

But is love something that just happens? Can love just appear? Does it fall out of the sky? Does it come with Cupid’s arrow?

Love is not a gift from the universe that just appears out of thin air. Contrary to what many of us experience, and contrary to what we want, love takes time. It takes patience. It takes commitment. It takes courage. It takes communication. It takes a willingness to put aside our hopes and dreams so that hopes and dreams can be shared with another, or with others. Like the lyrics I heard suggest: love is funny, love is real and love is heartache. It’s funny, and yet the irony is, it may be that we don’t approach love with as much seriousness as we should.

Shouldn’t love be more than a one-night experience? Maybe. Or maybe not. But love is real too. Love brings people together like no other gift the universe can provide. Love helps us to listen and care. It helps us to reach out and offer hope and help to another. And isn’t it real when love becomes heartache? The very gift that is to make our humanity full and complete and replete with wholeness and happiness, can tear the fibers of our souls apart.

So no matter where we find ourselves on the spectrum of sexuality, as another Valentine’s Day arrives and our attention toward love is focused, maybe we ought to let love be the mysterious reality it is. But perhaps we ought to give time, attention and commitment to what love requires of us too. Then, maybe Cupid’s stardust will open up the deep and wide spectrum of love in all of us.

Brian Henderson has been an ordained minister with American Baptist Churches, USA, for 13 years. Brian holds a doctoral degree in family-systems theory. Recently, he began as minister of First Baptist Church of Denver, located at 14th and Grant St., where Sunday services are held each week at 10:30 a.m.