Starting from not knowing

I have to confess something. I don’t know what love is.

I’ve said the word my whole life. I’ve said it to my wife, my kids, my friends, the men I sponsor. I’ve sung it in church and heard it at the end of meetings. And for most of those years, what I meant by it was something closer to a feeling of safety. Love was what made me comfortable. Love was the people who didn’t threaten me. Love was a warm thing I got.

That’s the version the world hands us. Love as self, safety and comfort. Find the people who make you feel good, and call that love. When they stop making you feel good, call it something else.

I’m not writing this because I’ve figured it out. I’m writing it because this week a rabbi who died in 2020 started answering questions I didn’t know I was still asking. I’ve been reading Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, and he keeps describing something that looks less like a feeling and more like a posture. A way of standing toward another person.

I want to try to follow him.

Listening looks a lot like loving

David Augsburger, a Mennonite pastor, once wrote that being heard is so close to being loved that most people can’t tell the difference.

I believe that. I believe it because I’ve been on both sides of it.

For years I listened the way a mechanic listens to an engine. I was waiting for the knock so I could name the problem and fix it. In conversations I was mostly reloading. Half my attention was on what the other person was saying and the other half was on what I was going to say back, and how it would make me look.

That isn’t listening. That’s waiting.

When I finally started actually listening to my wife, without defending, without fixing, without keeping score, something changed between us that years of talking never touched. She didn’t need me to solve anything. She needed to be heard. And being heard, it turns out, felt to her like being loved.

So maybe the first thing love looks like is a closed mouth and an open face.

Breath

The Hebrew word for soul is neshamah. It comes from the word for breathing.

I sat with that for a long time. In Genesis, God forms a man out of dust and breathes into him the breath of life. The soul isn’t some ghost hiding inside me. It’s breath. It’s on loan. Every inhale is a gift I didn’t earn and can’t keep.

You can’t grab a breath and hold on to it. You can only receive it and let it go.

Sacks wrote that in prayer God becomes “not a theory but a Presence.” And he said prayer is where God meets us, in our acknowledged vulnerability. Not in our competence. Not in our résumé. In the place where we admit we need Him.

I’ve known that in my bones for thirty-one years, since the day I couldn’t fix myself anymore. But I’m only now starting to see that it’s the same with people. Love doesn’t happen where I’m strong. It happens where I’m honest about being weak. Where I stop managing how I come across and just breathe in front of somebody.

Moses, the man the Torah says spoke with God face to face, is also the one it calls the most humble man on earth. The one closest to God took up the least space.

I’m beginning to think love is a lot like breathing. Receive it. Let it go. Don’t try to own it.

Covenant, not contract

Sacks drew a line I can’t stop thinking about. There’s a difference, he said, between a contract and a covenant.

A contract is a deal. Two parties, each looking out for their own interests, agreeing to terms. It lasts exactly as long as it pays. When it stops benefiting me, I’m out.

A covenant is a bond. Two people pledging themselves to each other, so that “I” becomes “we.” It isn’t held together by benefit. It’s held together by loyalty.

When I look honestly at most of my life, I was running contracts and calling them love. I’ll be good to you as long as you’re good to me. I’ll stay close as long as it’s safe. I’ll give, as long as I’m getting. That’s the self, safety and comfort version again, just with better manners.

The Hebrew Bible has a word for the other kind. Chesed. It gets translated as loving-kindness, or steadfast love, or mercy, and none of those quite land. It’s love you do. Faithful, unearned, and still there when the feeling isn’t.

The same thread runs through tzedakah, the word for giving, which means both justice and charity at once. Sacks pointed out that Jews call God Avinu Malkenu, our Father, our King. A king gives justice. A father gives a gift out of love. Real giving holds both. It’s what’s right, and it’s what’s tender.

I used to think love was the feeling that made me do things. Now I wonder if love is mostly the doing, and the feeling sometimes shows up later. Sometimes it doesn’t. The covenant holds either way.

The stranger at the door

In To Heal a Fractured World, Sacks tells a Hasidic story I keep coming back to.

At the end of the Sabbath, a disciple finally works up the courage to ask his Rebbe why the Messiah hasn’t come. Hasn’t the world suffered enough? Haven’t the signs been fulfilled?

The Rebbe’s answer is that the Messiah couldn’t come even if he wanted to. Whatever group he belonged to, every other group would refuse to recognize him. Then he lowers his voice and tells the disciple a secret. We aren’t the ones waiting for the Messiah. The Messiah is waiting for us. He’s been here all along.

So the Rebbe gives him an instruction. Treat every person you meet, familiar or stranger, learned or not, as if they might be the Messiah, because he will surely come in disguise. Do that, and one day you’ll realize he already came.

I’m a Christian, and I couldn’t read that without hearing Jesus. “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Or Hebrews, about strangers we welcome who turn out to be angels.

What undoes me is how ordinary it is. It’s the customer who’s angry about his bill. The newcomer at the meeting who won’t look anybody in the eye. The guy who calls too late at night. My own family on a hard day.

I don’t get to decide who is worth my attention. Every face might be the face of God in disguise. If that’s true, then love isn’t something I give to the people who’ve earned it. It’s how I meet whoever is standing in front of me.

Where fear used to stand

For a long time I’ve believed that everyone’s access to the truth is mediated by fear. I think the same is true of love.

The self, safety and comfort version of love is really fear wearing love’s clothes. It keeps me in charge. It keeps me protected. It lets me decide who gets close and how close they get. It never asks me to breathe in front of anybody.

John wrote that there is no fear in love, that perfect love drives fear out. And then, a sentence later, he says why love is even possible for people like me: “We love because he first loved us.”

That’s the order. I don’t start it. I receive it, like breath. Then, if I’m willing, I pass it on, by listening, by staying, by giving, by treating the person in front of me like they might be carrying God.

I still don’t know what love is. Not really. But I’m starting to recognize its posture. It leans toward people instead of away. It listens longer than it’s comfortable. It keeps covenant when the contract would let it walk. It’s humble enough to need, and to be needed.

The pamphlet I’ve been reading ends with a short prayer that opens Ribbono shel olam, Master of the World. It asks for help thinking more about others and less about myself, for eyes to notice who needs comfort, for the kind word and the kind deed.

That’s about as far as I’ve gotten.

Maybe that’s far enough for today.