In one of his poems, entitled “The Subject Tonight is Love,” Hafiz writes, “The subject tonight is love, and for tomorrow night as well. As a matter of fact, I know of no better topic for us to discuss until we all die.” And I completely agree—there are so many things to discuss concerning love. First of all, what does ‘love’ even mean? Love seems to describe any positive emotion we feel towards another person. If you hear the phrase ‘I love her.’ It could be a parent talking about his/her daughter, a man talking about his wife or girlfriend, a teenager effusing over a celebrity, a woman talking about her wife or girlfriend, a girl laughing at the antics of her friend to another friend, or someone talking about their pet rabbit or hamster or dog or cat. One thing’s for certain, love is not a word that embodies clarity.
Love is mind boggling in its complexity; it is both a verb and a noun, it is platonic, frustrated, content, unrequited, mutual, deep, shallow, open, restricted, individual, communal, simple, complicated, harsh, gentle, and I could go on and on. What does it say about us that we have hundreds of thousands of adjectives in the English language, but only one word for a ridiculous spectrum of feelings and sentiments toward other people? Why don’t we have as many words for love as the Inuit have for snow?
My grandfather likes to say that ‘love’ is doing whatever is necessary and good for the other person whether they deserve it or not. And I find this definition incredibly helpful when remembering Jesus’ call for us to love our enemies and to love our neighbors as ourselves. But there are still so many other uses of the word ‘love’ where people mean something completely different. And maybe that’s the whole point—maybe we’re not supposed to have a concrete, one-size-fits-all, universal definition of love. In fact, the most powerful statement of ‘love’ that I can think of does not define love, but rather uses love to define; God is love. And here is where the confusing array of definitions and uses for love begins to make a tiny bit of sense for me. I think that love is our attempt to define God’s presence among us, within us, and between us. Maybe we don’t have as many words for love as the Inuit have for snow because we don’t view these different types of love as distinct entities, but as aspects of the same thing—the Holy Spirit moving through us. And maybe whenever we say, “I love you,” we’re recognizing the presence of Christ in that person.
So, yes, Hafiz—the subject tonight and tomorrow and every night after will be love because I know of no better topic to discuss than God made manifest among us.