In his song Taxi, the late Harry Chapin sings that he “learned about love in the back of a Dodge…”
Then I read in my father’s memoirs about him sitting by his wife Chris’s bed as she died, gently spooning teaspoons of soup into her mouth. That’s also love, but very different from Chapin’s groping in the dark.
“Love” has become a catch-all word used to describe almost any kind of warm emotion. “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels,” the apostle Paul wrote, “if I have no love, I am nothing…”
Paul’s great hymn to love continues: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful… It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful… It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends…”
Really?
Try telling that to the couples whose infatuations end in bitter divorce. Tell it to the battered spouse, afraid to go public because it will lead to even more beatings. Tell it to the child, molested in the night, supposedly in the name of love.
We’ve invested far too much in a single word.
Paul’s Greek contemporaries defined three kinds of love.
Eros was physical love, the hormonal urges that drive two people together.
Filios was what they called brotherly love—the bonds between siblings. Siblings don’t always get along together, but there’s an unbreakable connection.
Agape was compassionate love, a genuinely disinterested caring about others that expected nothing in return.
But those three categories don’t identify all the loving relationships possible. None of them, for example, adequately defines my relationship with my grandchildren.
How does friend love fit? No obligation, no genetic ties, but a deep sense of loyalty.
Or aging love. The bedrock remains; the peaks and canyons of youth passion have leveled out. Time is too short to sweat the small stuff.
Then there’s child love. A child does not love his mother the way she loves him, or her. A child’s love is needy—the need to be fed, clothed, sheltered, protected and nurtured.
Couple love is eros, of course. But it goes beyond mere sexual desire. Two people in love want to be one, emotionally and intellectually as well as physically. It’s more like total immersion in each other.
Mother love—the biblical term was hesed or chesed, sometimes translated as womb-love—is utterly devoted and self-sacrificing at its best. Even animal mothers will risk their own lives for the sake of their offspring. And why not? These children were once part of her own body, closer than any embrace.
And father love—the archetypal warrior or rescuer, the provider and protector who provides discipline and stability, who can sometimes become dominating and controlling.
So many kinds of love. So many kinds of relationships.
So why do we tend to restrict religious experience to just one model? There are lots of biblical images of all the other kinds of love. But mostly I hear God described as an Almighty Father.
Are divine relationships more limited than human ones?