On Love: thinking out loud

It's amazing how ground-less feelings are, despite the reality that at their culmination they seem to consume our very being. Its entire gamut, from rapturous love to livid fury, all eventually dissipate according to its season and time. But if we are called to love one another without any sort of equivocation, then it cannot mean that love is an aesthetic-romantic emotion, since such a thing is untenable in eternity - the infinite time frame that God's commandments must be made manifest. We cannot simply love when we feel like loving, but we must love regardless of our desire to love. We echo, then, the command, not the choice, of Scripture: Love the Lord your God, and, Love your neighbor as yourself. (Of course, it is within our free will to choose to follow the command, but for the Christian, such a convenience ought not to exist... maybe?)

Another unfortunate thing about love is that its emotional response, the feeling of being in love, is that it cannot be willed, and thus resists commandments. I cannot say to myself, "Self, I want you to will yourself to feel love for this person so that my efforts to love this person will be natural and joyous." On the other hand, I also cannot say, "Self, I want you to stop feeling love for this person so that I would not be distracted from loving others." Feelings of love tend to be, at least for guys, largely due to the girl's appearance. For guys like me then, it's imperative that I make sure that I am in love not with the body, which invites an unsustainable eros love, but with the holistic her, her entirety. Fortunately, people are irreducibly complex so there is no end to exploration... (unless they're just incredibly dull people.)

Also, I have been trying to understand how really to love someone. For (apparently) emotionally-stunted people like me, it is easy to fall in love with the feeling of being in love or the idea of being in love, rather than the person who ought to be the object of the love. This makes itself most manifest in the idealization of the person away from his or her actual fallen humanity - and this is a dangerous dangerous thing because it sets you up for profound disappointment at the ineluctable fall from grace from the ideal person to the real person. So, what part of that person am I loving? If not his or her entirety, I can hardly call it "true" love but only an approximate love. But maybe, in our fallen nature, this is the limit of our love; we can only love approximately but never fully, just as our actions are never winged by pure motivations.

Likewise, it is easy to fall in love with the idea of the Christ (which anybody and everybody by nature can do and does) but very difficult to fall in love (in the emotional sense) with Jesus the Christ - the person (which only the Christian can do, but just barely at least for me).