LOVE, 2024

Love hopes but does not expect; love is not entitled. 

Love does not coerce; it offers neither reward nor punishment. Love does not pressure one to change, but gently holds a beloved when change is needed, when change is undertaken. 

Love doesn’t find fault, but it also doesn’t put up with bullshit. Love is not a doormat. Love holds a boundary, that’s how it avoids resentment and remains love.

Love is multiplied when given and therefore it knows not greed.

Love simply requests what it needs.

Love respects that we never know the whole picture, so love remains humble. Love wants the best for others, and it puts faith in others to figure out what is best for themselves. Love gives the benefit of the doubt.

Love plays. Love seeks joy. Love is wildly hospitable. Love creates, spreads, and celebrates goodness and beauty.

Love seeks truth. Love accepts truth, even when it’s painful, even when it means admitting error, mistaken assumptions, or incorrect beliefs. 

Love says “yes and” to whatever it faces. Love seeks both/and solutions to problems so that no one is left out.

Love stands up for the vulnerable.

Love accepts; love listens. Love is curious, not judgmental -- willing to know another completely. Love is present; it checks in. Love makes one feel seen.

When one is loved or when one feels love, it is a gift, and it is also an invitation to extend the love that one has known and felt.

Love transcends physics, defies the odds, and is the source of miracles.

Perhaps the biggest miracles of love are miracles of forgiveness: for those who’ve hurt us; for the inevitable bad things that happen; for our grief and tribulations; for life being life. 

Perhaps love’s biggest miracle of all is forgiveness and love for the unlovable parts of ourselves, for our mistakes, regrets, and failures. 

Love can heal in surprising ways if we hold hope for that healing, maintain faith it can happen, and persevere.

Faith is a leap love compels. Hope entreats us to struggle for relationships and goodness without attachment to outcomes. Paradoxically, love generates faith and hope, and paradoxically, faith and hope generate and fuel love.

Faith, hope, and love are intertwined and inseparable. May we know them in abundance. May we share them abundantly.

Let it be.

Photos are my personal shots of the I Love You Wall, or Le mur des je t'aime, in the Montmartre neighborhood in Paris. Artists Frédéric Baron and Claire Kito collected the phrase in more than 300 languages and displayed them on lava tiles.

A note about this piece:

In the Episcopal tradition, the four Sundays leading up to Christmas are known as Advent, and each week, a candle is lit in recognition of a virtue Jesus embodied in the world. The candles represent hope, peace, joy, and love.

The theme for this last week of Advent is love. Two of the most important pieces of spiritual writing to me over the past decade have been Nadia Bolz-Weber's Modern Beatitudes and The Womanist Lord’s Prayer written by Reverend Yolanda M. Norton. Both of these pieces interpret Jesus’s teachings in contemporary language, in light of our modern context, in women’s voices. They pierce my heart in the best possible way. Inspired by these women and their works, for love week, I have attempted to set down my understanding of what love is —  incomplete and imperfect as it undoubtedly is — in the spirit of the Apostle Paul’s famous verses in his First Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13. 

My understanding of love comes from numerous sources: my close relationships, theological study, art and literature, time spent in church, years of therapy, and moral exemplars who excel at loving. My understanding also frankly comes from times I have been hurt and from times I have missed the mark at loving well myself. Hopefully I’ve learned some good lessons along the way. I’m still learning.

I’d love to hear from you and learn what love is to you.

A note about my writings this month:

At the beginning of this December, I felt the desire to write reflections each week on Advent’s great themes. I have followed that impulse. I especially need hope, peace, joy, and love this year, and each essay has been a reminder to myself of their necessity and their power. They require resilience and determination to muster, and they also give us resilience and determination to keep going.

Beliefs and ideologies often separate us, but we all need hope, peace, joy, and love. Though my writing is inescapably shaped by my own formation, situatedness, and life experiences, I have attempted to reflect on the Advent themes in ways that point to their universality and therefore to our interconnectedness while not shying away from challenging topics. Tough needle to thread.

If you’ve been reading along this month, thank you! It is very nice for a writer to have readers, and I am grateful for your engagement with the ideas I’ve written about. If you’ve missed previous posts this month and are interested in reading them, they are here on my blog, listed on the right side of the page. 

I wish you and yours hope, peace, joy, and love this Christmas and throughout the New Year.

Love,

Jennifer