That L Word

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Last night, at the long table of our matriculation dinner, a fellow (and by fellow, I mean a professor of our college) beside me responded to a question posed to her by the girl sitting across from me. After a lengthy discussion on the politics of the English faculty, and a slight pause for the serving of the main course, the girl asked her whether she had been brought up in any sort of religious background. To this the fellow explained that she fortunately (her words) had not since she believed that involvement in any type of religion prevents a truly objective and scholarly view of the world. She proceeded further to explain that she had never believed that there was a god, and that she had felt this since she was very little. And in those deepest, darkest moments of her life – places where most people find or feel God – she had felt absolutely nothing and so decided as such. She thought for a moment and then, with a gesture of her hand and flip of her hair (yes, some Cambridge fellows are just that young), she concluded that because she didn’t believe in God, she simply fell in love – very easily.

Of all the places I have visited or seen in books (and granted, that is not much), Cambridge is perhaps one of the most romantic places I have ever been. With its beautiful stone arches, old, old buildings, and lush forests and greenery that hug the Cam, it is a place so incredibly conducive to falling in love. And so, being a girl of 21, I would be lying if I professed to claim that such thoughts had not crossed my mind. And then I thought about how easily I, myself, fell in love and how much hurt often followed (in both the small whims and fancies and also the long requited ones) and wondered whether such a quality spoke manifestly of my relationship with God. “I don’t believe in God, I simply fall in love,” the fellow laughed.

I thought about the reasons why those who did not believe in God were more inclined to fall in love and I came to the conclusion (partly with the help of that fellow – who is awfully sweet and smart by the way) that we were made to desire and that those desires often express themselves as expectations (latter part mine). Perhaps that is why love (now speaking generally) hurts so much, because it is such a deeply vested interest. The exhilarating, life-giving joy of love lies in the anticipation of what the loved object will do, and more oft than not, what that loved object “should” do; hence, the pain of disappointment.

And so I wonder whether there is a “proper” way for a Christian to fall in love. The corollary of these thoughts, I suppose, would be to heed the warnings of Jeremiah 2 by holding steadfastly to one’s first love and by placing all of those expectations (and joys) in the one who never disappoints. But what about the indescribable journey of just falling? Of getting swept off one’s feet? Have not writers and philosophers professed that the only way to fall wholly is to also be open to the hurts from such expectations?

Posted on October 14, 2005 at 04:52PM