At some point during my lost High School years, I dimly remember a chemistry class where we learned about valence. In case you’ve forgotten, or were asleep during that particular lecture, valence is the term we use to describe that somewhat mysterious process in which atoms are attracted to one another and form a bond—sometimes so strong a bond that they are considered inseparable except by extraordinary means. Think about water—H2O. Hydrogen and Oxygen, two gases, come together to form water—and while they can be changed or even separated and returned to their natural state by heat, cold or fission they cling to one another with firm attraction because they have valence.
It’s that way with people as well. As we move through our lives we find valence, with others, and sometimes with our higher selves—the animating force I refer to as God. If you think about it, perhaps that is why we often refer to that attraction we have for certain very specific others as chemistry. No doubt at some atomic level perhaps that kind of chemistry really is chemical—but what we mean is that we find in someone a connection that attracts us to them, possibly for life. Many philosophical and psychological explanations have been offered up to explain why we are attracted to one person and not another, and why in some cases, we are attracted to someone that our logical brain knows is just plain wrong for us. For most of us, however, this is just as mysterious as the attraction hydrogen has for oxygen.
From time-to-time, I come across an article about or meet a couple that have that inseparable connection. You know the stories I am talking about. The husband and wife who so love one another that they live only for each other and when –often at great age, they pass from this world to the next they depart within minutes of each other. Or perhaps you have met a couple like this, as I have had the good fortune to do.
When we meet such people they seem amazing and beautiful, as indeed they are. We see them endowed with an almost superhuman capacity for love and forgiveness—people so generous of nature and so self-less as to inspire in us a sense of awe and a desire to have what they have—unperturbable, undiminished happiness throughout their lives. Would that it were so for us all. The truth is that the secret to these long persisting relationships is a lot richer and more mysterious than we know. The truth is, they do not simply love one another—at least not in the sense we often use those words.
The English language offers us only one word to describe all the possible ways we are able to love. Through vocal nuances we convey the difference between romantic love, the love of a brother or sister, the love we have for our friends, our children, and even our love for all mankind. We reserve a special inflection, however, for our love of God, if we express it at all. That is something called reverence.
Scripture occasionally speaks about love of God in terms that can be discomfiting. It uses words that convey an almost romantic love—when it describes us in relation to God as in a courtship or marriage. Nuns, for example are often described as brides of Christ. Even for those of us who don’t live in convents—there are entire passages that speak in these ways about our relationship to God. I have to confess they always made me uneasy, until one day as I was talking to God about what he had done in my life, all of the blessings he had showered on me and the great good fortune I had to have so many wonderful caring people in my life, I blurted out: I love you God. And I said it with the mental image of a man speaking to a maiden—yes in an almost romantic sense. I have no idea why that mental image came to mind—but it was clear I was speaking about that inseparable bond—that connection that is so visceral and all-encompassing that it is like the highest level of romantic love we can imagine.
I hope you are not shocked by this—I’m not sure I can fully fathom it myself, but what I do know is that what I feel, have felt for a few humans, a deep and almost overwhelming romantic love is what I felt for God at that moment. Does that strike you as odd? Well it did me at first. But over time I gradually began to put it all together. When we find that special someone in our lives—the person we want to spend our entire lives with—the one that makes us feel at peace and content, what we are really feeling is the same kind of love that God gives us all the time. We do not ever wish to be separated from this person—we wish to go to death’s door with them hand in hand—and beyond. You know that feeling of deep and abiding love, don’t you? Maybe you have felt this, or maybe just imagined what it would be like.
Perhaps the greatest gift God has given us is this capacity for love. If only we could sustain it—and even in a less potent form act out of it towards all we meet—it would be a very different world in which we live. But, as we know, we are, unfortunately, only human. It is hard for us to love the way God loves us. It is so hard that only a few fortunate couples have learned to love that way towards each other, fewer still as individuals have learned to love that way in all their relationships, romantic or otherwise. But that my friends, is exactly what God does and how he wishes us to love. I’m working on it—flawed as I am, and it is work. Every day I am challenged to love unselfishly, to love completely, and to love without expectation of anything in return. It is not easy.
I can also tell you in all honesty that once you have felt this kind of love, once you have felt your heart swell beyond your ability to comprehend you cannot go back. Mothers and fathers, think how you felt when you first looked in the eyes of the child you conceived. Husbands and wives, cast your eyes back to that first moment when you knew, knew with every fiber of your being that the person across from you was meant to be with you, forever. Remember that feeling? Isn’t it worth everything to have that again? So let me let you in on the rest of the secret I spoke about above. When we love the way God loves us—as hard as that is for us as humans, that is when we feel those powerful, life altering feelings. That is peace, contentment, and it is at those moments when we are beyond our own humanity, loving forgiving, self-less, putting all others before us, we feel the way God did, when he went to the cross.