Why Love?

Is there value intrinsic to the idea itself, regardless of measurable results?

I’ll state the obvious. I’m an idealist(not to be confused with lazy passive optimism).  The novel and the beautiful capture me. However, my idealism can be double edged, for sure. 

As Stanley Kubrick’s character General Broulard profers, “You’re an idealist, and I pity you as I would the village idiot.”¹ Maybe he’s right to do so.  Perhaps I’m like Miguel de Cervantes’ endearing protagonist tilting at windmills. To be pitied only because they dared to see something different than the prevailing cultural gravity of nihilism. 

Those who can intuit possibilities of Love, beauty, and novelty can taste the transformation, healing, and a sense of mutual connection and life-giving community in sustaining, motivating and tenaciously hopeful ways. See it, yes. Have it realized … well that’s a different matter. Regardless,if you see it you can’t unsee it. 

So, who is the most sane? Okay, maybe more content? Okay, maybe not content but maybe more ruggedly hopeful, inspired, innovative?

The realist/nihilist - blessed are those who hope for nothing for they won’t be disappointed - or the idealist architects daring to dream an impossible dream?  Much of the best and most significant innovation has been achieved by folks who dared to imagine big ideas, many of whom were mocked and told that it was impossible. But this very potential for transformation keeps us inspired and hopeful.

Living as an idealist is an arduous journey. As the Psalmist wisely notes, 'hope deferred makes a heart sick'². The frustration, anxiety, and exhaustion that accompany the pursuit of BIG ideas and movements can be overwhelming. It's a path that can take generations, with a massive amount of energy barely moving the needle and the stark reality that these ideas may never fully materialize. So, should we give up if we don’t see the results?

Yes and No.

We give up measuring the worthiness of our BIG IDEA by our expectation of specific results, timelines and prevailing cultural cynicism. 

This may drive many folks nuts as we have learned to see value based on anemic and ill-fitting metrics within a quantifiable timeline.  Great (maybe) when we are talking about widgets, market share and dividends, but what about really Big Ideas, far beyond the numbers to the left of a decimal and an ROI measure? An entirely different set of metrics is required, a different way of seeing that transcends the chronic commodification of ... well ... everything.

Is there value in such ideas intrinsic to the idea itself, regardless of its measurable results? I’ve been finding solace of late in the words of Trappist monk Thomas Merton when he writes:

“Do not depend on the hope of results when you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work; you have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect.“³

Well, that’s not the rosy, comforting response I hoped for.   But there is truth here. Painful but necessary.  This is a path; if we linger here for just a few seconds more, it will lead us deeper.  For once, our illusions of grandeur have been shattered. “You start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.”⁴ This is when our work truly becomes Love.

To this end, Vaclav Havel (statesman, author, poet, playwright, dissident and  former President of the Czech Republic) reminds us that some Big Ideas have value in and of themselves: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”⁵

Havel expands:“Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.”⁶

Likewise, Emmanuel Levinas (Jewish/French philosopher who focused on the relationship of ethics to metaphysics and ontology) states: “Faith is not a question of the existence or non-existence of God. It is believing that Love without reward is valuable.”⁷ Love has value, for Love’s sake.

Love often manifests on the margins, in our peripherals, in ways that don’t make a big splash or are neatly measurable. Love is not commodifiable, and still be Love.  Love, usually, is subtle but quite tenacious. A Big Idea that plays in 10,000 places all at once, moment by moment. The trick is to see it!

Mark 8 tells the story of Jesus and his friends in Bethsaida, where he has the opportunity to meet a blind man. You know, the story where Jesus used saliva to heal the man’s eyes.  As we read, this partially worked - the man saw other people like walking trees. The story tells us that Jesus touched the man’s eyes a second time, and he could see perfectly.  Perhaps many of us think we can see, but we see what we are told to see, what the economic and religious structures want us to see - like good little trees. Perhaps we would all benefit from a second touch for fresh eyes?

When we come to see with new eyes, we can land our work in authentic ways almost everywhere. In time, these new metrics will bring about a life-giving change where we understand that we are entangled with others and a Logos/Wisdom of Love we co-labour alongside. Love is always at work.  We understand that big ideas are adopted at a grassroots level, planted in relational contexts. Maybe like a Mustard seed, “the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree so that the birds come and perch in its branches.” (Mt. 13:32)

My choice to love is not because it’s easy (‘cause it’s not) or because I seek validation from others. I see Love as the fundamental energy at the genesis of everything. I see Love inspires greater complexity, beauty with more complex and beautiful expressions of Love. I choose Love because of its inherent value, rightness, truth, and capacity for novelty, creativity, and beauty. Love calls, inspires, and lures us towards reconciliation, integration,wholeness; a differentiating unity that is uniquely more than the sum of its parts.

I love because God is Love⁸ by unchangable nature, and I know Love because God first loved me (us)⁹ - in and through all things.   The entangled God-who-is-Love shimmering in all creation. 

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Sola Caritas,

Michael

1. The Path of Glory (1957), Stanley Kubrick.

2. Proverbs 13:12

3. Letters to a Young Activist (1966), Thomas Merton.

4. Ibid.

5. https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/09/22/vaclav-havel-hope/

6. Ibid.

7. The Asymmetry of the Face: Interview with Emmanuel Levinas

by France Guwy for Dutch Television (1986)

8. 1 John 4:7-21

9. Ibid.