Pilgrim Soldier

Ok last post out of Exiles which I finally finished on Monday night!

Frost says:

Love then, in the Christian framework, is an action. It is a verb, not a noun. To love is to do something for others, not necessarily to feel something for them. It is to desire their spiritual growth, so that they might blossom and grow and become everything that God intended them to be in the first place. And, interestingly, this is also how we love God, by serving God’s creation.¹

Frost is speaking on this subject from the aspect of some of the modern worship songs that express the love we have towards God as being of a romantic type of love. I tend to agree with him on this, although I still find myself singing the lyrics to some of these songs without worrying about it. Two people I respect have made similar comments in the last year. Firstly Geoff Ryan in an article on theRubicon.org said:

… more often than not the lyrics bear an unnerving resemblance to those of a 16-year-old girl mooning over her boyfriend. The sentiments of being “desperate for you,” “longing for you” and wanting to be “found in your embrace” are more telephone talk than theology, I reckon.²

Secondly, Eleanor Burne-Jones comments about her son that:

Just try getting a twelve year old boy to engage with romantic songs about being in love with Jesus. So I went out searching for some good crunchy ones themed on social justice and creation care and - guess what - nobody could point me to any.³

This move towards a romantic love in our worship songs shows one of the problems we have. When we talk about love within the Church we can reduce it to an emotional understanding. We are urged to love our neighbour and to show that love through actions, but the reality is that this is not an easy thing to do, because our first thought of love is an emotion. Due to our life experiences this is usually in respect of either romantic love or the love we feel for our family.

This understanding instantly causes a problem when it comes to loving our neighbour as David Fitch points out in a recent post on his blog. Using a quote from Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov”:

The idea of loving one’s neighbor is possible only as an abstraction: it may be conceivable to love one’s fellow man at a distance, but it is almost never possible to love him at close quarters.⁴

Now I’m not as cynical as this, but it is difficult to love our neighbour in the same way as we love those who are closest to us. This is why we need to understand that loving others is more about doing things for them, rather than feeling something.

One thing to consider is that when we start doing things for other people we begin to see the inherent worth that every individual has. Every man, woman and child in this world is made in the image of God. As we start to do things for them, not only do we begin to see them as God sees them, but it is also an act of worship.