The Paradox of Love

“Philosophy is the wisdom of love at the service of love.” Emmanuel Levinas

“Love begins in our opening to and welcome of others, and grows as we attend to them in their integrity and wholeness.” Norman Wirzba

“Though we cannot know God, we can love God.” Anonymous

"I am loved, therefore I am." James Olthuis 

“Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” 1 John 4:8

I want to write something. I can think of no higher topic, nothing more important, than love. But what can I say about love? What could I possibly have to say about love?

Love is ineffable. That is, it cannot be put into words. I cannot speak about love. It is beyond the confines of language.

Yet I must speak about love.

I am describing a mystical tradition. Mystics often are the first to say that there is nothing to say about love, God, the divine, the transcendent, the mystery that created and enfolds the world. And after stating the impossibility of words they go on at great length in poetic forms to describe what they cannot describe. They attempt the impossible.

I have nothing new to say. I’ve read some brilliant philosophers and theologians discuss love. I have wise friends and professors who talk about love with great eloquence and sophistication. I have family, friends, past romantic relationships, teachers, and mentors which have exemplified and do all display an amazing outpouring practice of love, a practice which gets closer to describing love than even poetry from the most profound mystics.

Saying that I have nothing new to say about love is not to say anything new. Any and all words and actions of love are never anything new. We are always in the middle of love. It’s always already begun, and we simply pick up what has been dumped all over the place, we simply open our mouths to the perpetual stream, we simply jump on board a train that’s already bound for love. We didn't do anything, we didn't create love out of nothing. Whenever we get going with practicing love, either as a philosophical or theological description, or in concretely opening ourselves to otherness, we’re never starting something new. Even as I write these words, these very words which are fresh on this page, even as I try to describe something about love which has never before been expressed in this specific instance, there’s still nothing new. It’s still just jumping into a river that is already flowing.

And yet… it is new. Love is always new! How could it not be new? Every new instance of love adds itself to an already completed action of love. Love needs nothing and yet love rejoices when new love is released, when love is once again given the chance to burst out of the container that we’re tempted to keep it inside of. Hans-Georg Gadamer says of understanding that it is “not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well”. This is even more true in the case of love. Love is not merely reproductive, it is always productive. Love is so exciting because it always brings something new! In our openness to otherness in other people, creation, and in God we’ll always be in awe of the depth and diversity found in everything. What a thrilling way to live life, in love that continually opens to new possibilities!

And yet… for all the newness that shows up when we love and talk about love, we’re always in the middle of love.

In a very unpoetic yet, I believe, genuine way, let me try to describe briefly this new/not new paradox.

Whatever newness we ourselves create in love (the only true newness there is), love was always already there. Yes. And wherever love bursts forth, something new has arrived that wasn't there before. Yes. Amen.

“The one who testifies to these things say, ‘Surely I am coming soon’. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” Revelation 22: 20