The Will to Love

I clicked on the "random" button at Blogging Episcopalians (a link to your right) as I do from time to time and found an interesting post the at blog The Propaganda Box: The Tyranny of Love. The movie Imagine Me & You caused the blogger to question our current cultural ways of considering love saying,

Love is depicted in this film as something that just sort of happens to us, the way we might just happen to acquire a disease. Once “love” has set in, it is impossible to do anything but give in to it. Love must be obeyed. If love is not obeyed, our lives will become worthless as we waste away in hopeless marriages. Once one is struck with the happiness of true love, all previously made promises become null and void, including those made before God at the altar of marriage.

If I were Luce, shacking up with this woman who just threw away her marriage vows for the sake of “true love,” I’d be careful to watch my back. Watching this movie made me think quickly of another movie about this sort of “true love” syndrome, Patrick Marber and Mike Nichols’ brilliant film Closer from 2004. The tagline from that film was “If you believe in love at first sight, you never stop looking.” In other words, if love becomes nothing more than the fulfilling of an impulse, it isn’t truly love. It’s an addiction.

What bothers me most about Imagine Me & You though is the way that this idea of love is so easily accepted.

An alternate view is the Christian one expressed by Frederick Buechner who wrote

In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion but an act of will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling.

In another book, Buechner wrote,

And then there is love for the enemy—love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured’s love for the torturer. This is God's love. It conquers the world.

We do not have to be merely the victim of our feelings. Perhaps we cannot completely control our feelings, but neither are we powerless against them. Love can indeed be and often is an act of will. We decide to act kindly to some one and then those actions result in better feelings toward the person. What do you think? To what degree is love a choice, an act of will?

In the archives are the sermons All Whom God Loves and A Still More Excellent Way

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor + King of Peace Episcopal Church