Love Does Not Exist

by

Practicing Faith

My love list is similar to many. I love God, my spouse and children. I love lemon chills and vacations. I love putting in a good days worth of work and I love Sabbath. However, the Christian life is one that comes to see that love does not exist.

This is not to say that love is not real. Love is very real. But love does not exist as an object that we can identify. Or to echo John Caputo, Love does not exist, it insists. What does that mean? Here is an example.

When I walk through a park I see a lot of things. I also do not see a lot of things. I walk through the park and walk past 100 people and don't see them. These people are like other things in the park - objects. The people might as well be trees or benches and I just don't see them. 

However, the moment I walk past my son I instantly see him. I can tell you the color of his eyes and what he was wearing. I can tell you if he was happy or upset or if he was pretending to be a Jedi knight fighting off the bad guys from Skylanders with his fellow good guys from Paw Patrol. I can walk past him and when I see him he is not an object - he is a subject. It was love that pulled him from crowd and into my view. from the background to the foreground. When we experience love, we are responding to the invitation of love to not see something or someone as an object but as a subject. To "objectify" someone is to not experience love for that person. 

This is why love insists. Love is everywhere, insisting all things into existence. If there was no love then all things would evaporate. One Bible writer says that God is love, and we all know that God is not an object. God is the animating force of all things. God is not a thing - God calls all things into being. Without the Love of God then it all ends. Or to put it another way, love never fails.

The Rev. Jason Valendy, along with his wife the Rev. Estee Valendy, serves as co-pastor of Saginaw United Methodist Church in Saginaw, Texas. He blogs at JasonValendy.net, from which this post is republished with the author's permission.