The Power of Love

I heard a fascinating insight on NPR’s This American Life—episode 638, “Rom-Com” [download].

“If you loved me, you’d learn to read” was the feeling; the speaker, a stand-up comedienne, had learned that her boyfriend had dropped out of school in the fifth grade. Somehow he mostly managed to get along without reading skills: he had a job and an apartment,which they shared. She wanted to help him remedy his illiteracy. You might guess that this didn’t go well, and you’d be right.

Her insight was that obstacles—in this case, her boyfriend’s illiteracy—carry the attractive promise that if we can somehow fix them, life will be great and we’ll be able to do all the things we wish we could. It is, of course, an illusion. As Shakespeare didn't write, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our obstacles, but in ourselves.”

Which reminds me of something I heard many years ago: some couples will hire a contractor to build their “dream home” or maybe remodel their present home to remove all its defects. Shortly after construction is complete, divorce usually follows. I don’t recall exactly where I heard this, or whether any explanation was given for these divorces, but I suspect that when their home is in its “ideal” state, there’s no more “if we could just get [this or that] fixed…” and one partner blames the other instead: “If I could just get rid of you…”

This also is doomed to failure. As Merton wrote, “Hence I do not find in myself the power to be happy merely by doing what I like. On the contrary, if I do nothing except what pleases my own fancy I will be miserable almost all the time.” (No Man Is an Island 3.1, p.25)

Which brings me to this morning’s sermon at Trinity, where Aaron asked us, “If you could have a superpower, what would it be?” Having been primed by the reading—1 Corinthians 13, the “Love chapter” (and also by Huey Lewis and the News)—I called out, “The Power of Love!”

I suppose Lewis sings about another kind of love, but the reason the power of love would be my desired superpower is that those other lesser ones—being faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, or able to leap tall buildings in a single bound—those things can only overcome material and temporal obstacles. But the power of love, the power to be patient and kind, to not be envious, to not keep track of wrongs but to rejoice in goodness—that’s the power needed to overcome my greatest obstacles, by which I mean my selfishness and impatience and hubris and laziness.

Oh, and what did Merton mean by his comment about being miserable almost all the time? Basically that we make decisions for reasons we don’t actually know: “…our acts of free choice are… largely dictated by psychological compulsions, flowing from our inordinate ideas of our own importance. Our choices are too often dictated by our false selves” (Merton, loc. cit.). And that’s why if we just do what we like, the effects are often not to our liking.

So we need a superpower, or at least I do. I need the power of love—love from God. As John says, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10). I need him to change me, and I need to seek him and cooperate with him as he does his work.