For a long time, I’ve tried to live up to my saying that I would rather be loving than right. Another way to put it is that being loving is being right in a far more profound way than being correct on a matter.
To be clear, this isn’t my natural inclination or orientation. I dare not say that I’ve done this well, but it has been an unmistakable beacon that I believe was given to me a long time ago. I don’t remind myself of this because I’m particularly good at it, but precisely because I’m not.
I’m someone who likes ideas, concepts, and thoughtful, well-organized reasoning. I may not actually manage to conduct myself in such a way, but I strive to do so. I detest poor and fallacious argumentation and sometimes get caught up in trying to be correct on some matter while neglecting my calling to love.
I’m making this as a confession, my tendency to be ego-centric and want to win at the competition for whose logic is right. Of course, this pursuit can be quite abstract and disengaged.
The better way, the attempt to be loving, is grounded in what is real in the present moment. No intellectual distancing is possible in the authentic practice of love because there’s the other, the beloved, whose reality cannot be merely conceptualized. Actual interaction with each other holds us in better spaces.
All the Law and the Prophets hinge on these two commandments. Matthew 22:40
This is what Jesus asserts when summarizing the weight of what he identifies as the two greatest commands: to love God and to love one’s neighbor. The Law and the Prophets can be easily abstracted into formulas, concepts, and ideas, but Jesus won’t allow it. For him, all these writings have their significance only as an aspect of love. They are of love, or they are meaningless.
The practice of interpersonal relationships undergirds the true substance of all these writings, whether expressed through ourselves to God or ourselves to one another. Dynamic relational investment in the other, the beloved, powerfully negates the likelihood that we will succumb to intellectual distancing. We either love or we don’t, and the choice is between real interaction or withdrawal through abstraction.
Ultimately, for God to be love is for the divine reality to be manifest in the interaction between two people, whose mutual respect and selfless giving to each other reveal God. Our attempts to conceive of God intellectually will never fully capture the reality as much as our experiencing the sharing of God with one another in love.
God as a concept will always remain elusive, while God as love is eminently accessible. We know God through our hearts much more than our minds.
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