“Love Is A Verb”

Rev. David Takahashi Morris

December 9, 2007 

      This is the season of love.  It’s all about love these days—love for humanity, love for friends and family, love for that special someone.  Pick up a newspaper or magazine—you’ll find a story about love and the holidays.  Turn on the television—you’ll find a special about how the loving magic of Christmas overcomes the greatest of troubles, sandwiched between a few dozen commercials about how we can show our love this Christmas by buying just the right goodies.  In our country, and in the popular culture fed by American cultural exports all over the world, Christmas and the winter solstice holidays have become a festival of warm hearts.

      It can all get to be a little much, especially if we’re not feeling especially loved or loving.  This is a hard time of year to be lonely; it's a hard time to be confronting a fresh loss or to be reminded of an old emptiness.  If the surrounding of our family has never felt like a loving embrace, the constant images of family closeness can be tough to take.  But even if we’re not struggling or suffering in this season of sentiment, the constant diet can begin to seem like too much.

      It’s not that love isn’t real.  Even in our own cycles of isolation, we know that there is love—for partners, and for families, for those who are in need, and even love for humankind all over the world.  We do have these feelings; we’re born with the capacity for them.  They aren't only supported by the pseudo-sentiment of popular culture, they are lifted up by history's greatest teachers and guides, by the stories and faiths that have helped us all find meaning since human life began.  But we aren't born knowing how to express love any more eloquently than we’re born knowing how to express anything else.  We have to learn to speak; we have to learn to love.  My problem with the annual outpouring is that it doesn’t offer many useful lessons.

      Expressing love in words isn’t enough.  Love is a verb; as Mother Teresa says, it must be given expression in action.  Declaring “I love you” is not the same thing as being loving.  The “feeling” of love—the noun—is a meaningless reality if it is not made visible, made real in the world by action.

      In our culture, it’s easy to see the extravagant gesture as the ultimate expression of loving.  Our attraction to such gestures runs deep, and there's no denying they have great beauty and power to touch our hearts.  Think of Shah Jahan’s love and grief for his wife transmuted through his vision and his royal power into the Taj Mahal, one of the most serenely beautiful buildings in the history of the world.  And as much as I respect Richard Wagner, I have to admit that if Eric Clapton had written a song for me when I was in my twenties, I’d have been sorely tempted . . . Yet every serious word written about love, as opposed to those articles in self-help magazines about 10 great ways to wow your lover, every serious word assures us that it's not the grand gesture which keeps love alive.  It’s the day-to-day acts of caring and respect.  Those everyday ways of loving are the language we need to learn.

      Most of us learned our ways of loving in random and haphazard laboratories, from teachers whose training was the same as ours.  Think of the father in Robert Hayden's poem silently dressing in the freezing house, lighting the fires to ensure his family’s comfort before he wakes them to make ready for church.  The boy doesn't know that there is love in the hands lighting the flames.  He can’t hear love in the rhythmic sound of the shoebrush.  Does the father know?  Does the father even know himself?  Or is he just doing what he thinks he must to get things going?  Start the fires, polish the shoes, wake everybody up.  Make things ready.  Is he hearing himself saying “I love you?”

      So often we don't know or understand the feelings our actions express.  It's not always a comfortable gesture that shows our love, either.  In my own family my two brothers, three sisters, and I were the recipients of a constant stream of anxious reminders and questions from our mother.  Are you going out with your hair like that?  Are you sure you washed your hands?  Those aren't the people you should hang around with!  That's a dangerous part of town; somebody will hit you over the head.  I would never take my children to a place like that; I don't see how you can live there.  We were all adults, all six of us, before we ever understood that the only way to answer my mother's warning voice was to say "I love you too, Mom." 

      It’s less comfortable to acknowledge that long before we did understand it, we had long since internalized her technique, and that even when we did understand it, that didn’t prevent us from passing it on to the next generation.  When you get right down to it, of course, my own experience was pretty benign.  Sometimes it's a lot harsher.  .

      How many of us have learned to love from parents who knew only its austere and lonely offices?  How many have grown up surrounded by love expressed through anxiety, through fits of passion between long stretches of seeming indifference; even through those chronic angers themselves, and worse --- clumsy and inarticulate expressions that confuse love with control, or protection, or demands for obedience, or even inappropriate intimacies.

      We need to learn the actions that truly express love—and sometimes, we have to heal from the ones that don’t serve well, and unlearn them as we find better ways for ourselves.

      There are better lessons, as Leo Buscaglia reminds us, ways many of us learn languages of loving.  They’re not necessarily more skillful or direct—a garlic-soaked hankie tied around our neck wouldn’t make most of us feel loved—but at worst they do no harm, and at best they help us feel embraced and assured that someone is thinking of us.  Someone has us living in their heart.   Whisking the eggs for that special favorite omelet on a busy morning, perhaps, or taking the time every week to make sure we hear the latest installment in the ongoing drama of a tough work situation.  Maybe you’re the one who makes sure the groceries get bought, and maybe a little something special to go in the lunchbox.  Maybe you’re the one with the lunchbox.

      These small loving ways become more powerful expressions if we’re really conscious of what we mean by what we’re doing.  There was a time in my life when I turned on the porch light to serve as a quiet small beacon for a partner what had a late-night drive home from work twice a week.  I remember it as a small, almost physically intimate gesture that made me feel very close, and affected the quality of my greeting when the door opened.  I’ve been the recipient of small tokens—a feather, a heart-shaped stone, a perfect seashell—that told me unmistakably I was thought of, remembered with love whey my partner was away. 

      What small gestures do we use that show our love to those with whom we share our life?  What are your ways; what are the ways you remember being told you were loved, from your own early life—or from yesterday, or this morning?

      Of course, small loving gestures aren’t enough, if we are also behaving in ways which contradict them.  I can think of all too many times when I would rather call attention to a small daily token—look, I washed the dishes—isn’t this a pretty flower I found in the yard, I thought you’d like it—than acknowledge that I’ve had a temper tantrum with one of the children the day before, or forgotten to follow through on some task that cost my partner extra work or embarrassment. 

      The most powerful act of loving expression we can make is to live every day in full integrity with our relationships:  To keep our promises, to do what we say we’ll do, to hold up our end of shared responsibilities.  Above all, we show our love by keeping our loved one in our conscious thoughts as we make choices and decisions when they’re not there:  How will this affect him?  Will she like that?  Let me check before I promise to commit this time to work, or to recreation with others.

      When we stumble in this kind of action—and we will; I know this all too well—our most immediate temptation is to fall back on the Grand Gesture. I’m not about to deny the power of a couple dozen roses, or opera tickets, or an extravagant surprise from just the right clothing store (or Ben and Jerry’s) when coupled with a sincere and skilled apology.  But in the long run, it won’t do.  What love asks of us is our continually renewed commitment to keep our loved ones real and present in our minds and hearts and to act in ways that show our love.

      This quality of integrity in relationship extends beyond the circle of our closest connections, to all our interactions with the world.  All our loving actions need to share it.

      The gesture or action that's truly loving makes the other truly real.  We can make beautiful statements about our love for the poor or the oppressed, for example, but if there are no real poor or oppressed people in our lives, our actions may be generous but they’re not loving.  This is the great power of our work with the PACEM shelter effort, to me.  It gives us at least the opportunity to genuinely experience the reality of those we would help.  We greet the men who come to visit us.  Ideally, we might sit with them and share a meal, or even spend a few hours socializing or a night sharing the contours of their lives.  And as we listen to them and accept the reality of their lives and experience, our work against the causes of poverty and homelessness can be transformed and enriched.  It can become the work of love.

      The temptation of the grand proclamation or the extravagant gesture is strong in our relationships with the wider needs of humankind and the world we live in. It is a grand gesture of environmentalism to insist on green principles for a new building, but it won’t take the place of making and teaching others to make daily decisions to use less water, use more sustainable materials, drive less, recycle more.  It may be a grand gesture to join in acts of civil disobedience to end a war that is an increasingly naked effort to secure long-term supplies of unlimited oil—but if we’re not willing to dump our own big cars and trucks, get behind political efforts to concentrate American populations around mass transportation lines, and move ourselves out of the suburban country and into town, then we’re not serious about peace in a world where oil fuels war. 

      I’m not saying the great gestures aren’t needed.  John Kennedy calling the nation to shoot for the moon is a great example:  that extravagant gesture of commitment unleashed an extraordinary chain reaction of small and large actions which have had enormous results—not just getting us to the moon, but transforming countless aspects of our day-to-day lives through new technologies and knowledge.  

      In the same way, our own great decisions of commitment and love unleash our power to make the small intentional actions and choices that make our love real and meaningful in the world.  And in turn those small choices and actions of love fuel the great commitments of love that make our lives richer and more meaningful. As Mother Teresa said, “It is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the doing: A lifelong sharing of love with others.” 

      So may it be.