Love is an almost terrifying admission of weakness. It’s an admission that we lack something, that it’s not good for us to be alone. It’s an admission that the other person has something we need. But if we admit that they have something that we need, we’re forced to admit our own limitations and the fact that there are things we are missing. We’re not independent, self-creative, self-sufficient, infinite and complete. We’re missing out on something by lacking what the other person provides.

That’s a truly terrifying thought, an immense threat to our autonomy and happiness. There is something we need, and possessing it is not in our direct control. Instead, it’s in the hands of the other. An entirely different and strange creature. Someone quite different from ourselves, however much we comfort ourselves and idealize our partner by imagining them as a mere mirror image, a reflection of our own desires and preferences.

When love truly becomes love is when it finally loses those illusions and recognizes the true differences of the other person…and decides to accept them and desire them in spite of them, or even because of them. Puppy love is a naive love. But true love takes something chancy, something naive, and transforms it into something enduring, something wise and aware, something that, instead of being defined by the world and by chance, begins to order and organize the world around it.

It takes chemistry and converts it into life, into something growing and evolving and taking on purpose and drawing other things and relationships and people into its purpose. It takes a random moment, a meeting, a feeling, an attraction, a perception, and turns it into something that feels like destiny in retrospect. The story of our lives, an unremovable part of the meaning of life, part of who we are.

Death is the dissolution of purpose and order, the return of chaos to erase order and meaning. Love is the action of life: taking the chance interactions, the chaos, and transforming them, using them to build something with purpose and endurance, creation. Love creates new life, new order, new purpose, a new destiny and identity out of a mere moment of chance and the combinations of chemistry. Psychologically, but also literally. Love is stronger than death. Not because of some obscure emotional logic or arcane symbolism. Because of its very nature, because of what it is and what it does.

Love is the animus of life, the spirit of creation, the love of particularity, the desire for being, the I that finds its I-ness in discovering you. Love cannot help but create more life, more meaning, more purpose, more organization. It’s the organizing principle of the ultimate universal conception of life itself. God is love.

Afterword:

There was a particular writer who described his own identity in terms of love, as “the disciple whom Jesus loved”. And he had an immense amount to say on the subject of love (including that final quote). He even called his readers his beloved. And you can get into all the technicalities of the different areas where love plays out and how it operates differently in those arenas (family, friendship, country, art, erotic, spiritual, social). But it all ultimately flows from the necessary principle. God is love. Unless we are to deny life itself (God himself, the essence of life), we must love. Therefore we must love one another. You’ve never seen God. But when you love, God lives within you.

John wasn’t throwing out some crazy, feel good, hippy talk. He was drawing some necessary philosophical conclusions from what Jesus had taught him about life and about God. He suddenly could see what the essence of God was, and what that meant for us. God, through Moses and the prophets, had been trying to explain that concept for a long time, by demonstrating it with a single family that grew into a nation. And it was like pulling teeth or trying to love a two year old. It didn’t always go well. And it wasn’t a perfect revelation, not a complete one. It was like seeing God’s back, basically (to borrow from the theophany of Moses).

Seeing what Jesus did was like seeing God’s face. Suddenly, shockingly, John understood the nature of God in a way he never had before. God’s love was made manifest to him. And he realized, if I want to be part of that life, to have that life in me, then I have to love as he loves, because that’s what the nature of God and life is: love. And Paul had a similar revelation. Paul was a scholar, a brilliant student and leader and teacher and academic. And he wrote very passionately (probably because it spoke to his own deepest weaknesses and mistakes) about how it didn’t matter how smart of how great a speaker someone was, how brilliant or perfect they were. If they didn’t have love, they had nothing. They didn’t have God in them.