When we talk about love

It’s not an easy thing to talk about love. In fact, it frightens me to death.

A couple of friends (in the same way that Job had ‘friends’) have scolded me recently about not being consistent enough in my publication of this newsletter. In truth, it’s not because of busy-ness or lack of desire — it’s because I become overwhelmed at the idea of it, at the responsibility of it.

There’s a reason I called it Faith, Hope and Jazz ... replacing ‘love’ with ‘jazz’ lets me off the hook. Just a little.

I’ve said a lot of things about love over the years: here, there, and everywhere in between. I’ve stood in front of packed lecture halls, in board rooms, and at cafe tables. Some of my ‘audience’ have run away with what I’ve said as if I’ve given them a bag of cash. They scare me the most. They invariably come back at some later time to impress me with how much further they’ve taken my ideas, beyond anything I could have given them.

Good for them.

Funny that they never come back to engage me with anything approximating love.

Beware the teacher who isn’t cowering when he talks about love. Include me in that. If you’re not quivering at the knees at the thought of love, then you’ve already weaponised it. And at that point, it ain’t love.

I’m confessing something here: when it comes to people running around and shooting their mouths off about love, without ever truly experiencing it, I’m part of the problem. The way that artists are part of the problem, with their allegories and metaphors, or their clever musical hooks and catchy choruses. None of which are any closer to the experience of love than the words I’ve spouted over the years, or the words other people have gone on to repeat.

‘I’ll stand beside you hold you close, when you’re in need of comfort most, especially when you make no sense,’ sings David Bridie of My Friend the Chocolate Cake, an Australian band of the late ‘90s and early 2000s.

They were as sweet as chocolate, and said a lot about love via Bridie’s lyrics. I loved those songs and often play them when I want to ponder love. But at the end of the day, as original as those lyrics were, they were still quite a safe distance from love itself ... love behind the barricade of aesthetic niceties.

‘And if you make some strange mistake, fall down hard and break your neck, well I’ll be standing here right beside you,’ Bridie sings, in a song aptly named Talk About Love. ‘This is what we mean, when we talk about love.’

I’m sure he meant it. But that’s all it was: talk about love.

I had a ‘moment’ with a friend a few years ago, a conversation in a cafe about brokenness, in which for a fleeting few seconds my story, my timeline, my space and all my failings, aligned with hers, and there was complete mutual understanding ... love encounter. To avoid embarrassing her I won’t use her name, other than to call her Emma. The moment was gone in minutes, if not seconds. She had to leave for an appointment, so the moment was lost almost immediately. I stood on the pavement knowing I’d never have that precise experience again and that I’d always feel a sense of loss at its absence. Loss made more terrible because of the profundity of the experience. I rushed home to put words to the experience, but it was like being caught in an asthma attack, unable to draw breath. Futility. All I could think about was CS Lewis’s exhilaration about beauty in The Weight of Glory ... and his own sorrow at the ephemeral nature of it.

Our friendship dissolved shortly after this experience, and I couldn’t help but wonder if, for the shortest time, we had flown too close to the sun.

Why am I sharing this? Only to point out the gulf between the experience of love encounter, and the feeble words that attempt to put it in a bottle — words that can never successfully recreate what has already passed.

That moment is so far in the past for me now, and so distant from these attempts to do justice to its memory, that bringing it back to illustrate a point in a newsletter feels like a gross and silly betrayal.

Just as all writing about love feels a little like a betrayal.

As a reader, you’re complicit in that betrayal. A consumer of talk about love. You might even be satisfied that the words you’ve consumed have given you an actual taste of love. But how silly is that.

The troubling thing is that the world needs love now more than ever. Not words about love … love itself. It needs moments of mutual understanding and vulnerability. It’s the only way out of the world’s current morass. We all know it, whether we’re on the Left or the Right of this present darkness.

So what’s the solution? A bannerman? Someone to take up the charge? Would that be an artist, a theologian, a journalist, or a politician? Me? God forbid. A standard bearer isn’t what we need. There are enough men in the world angling for a scrap. What we need are more people willing to just shut up and allow the spaces in-between them and others to do their magic.

I’ll admit, when friends tell me I need to publish more, I feel the temptation to lead a campaign, to rally people around me to make the difference in the world. But I’m just another writer using words to avoid the in-between spaces … with talk about love.

I went to the park the other day to ponder a question that’s been on my mind a bit of late: Is there such a thing as a path that we’re meant to be on? Or is that just a church thing? Is it just a faith-community thing to say, ‘This is your perfect path’?

If you don’t feel like reading this bit, you can watch my park session over on YouTube instead:

I’ve had a lot of people say that to me over the years, and generally, they wanted something from me. If somebody wanted me to work for them, they would say that God had told them I was the one, and that this was my path. And I think I swallowed it, or at least the idea of it — probably for much of my life. There is a lot of security in thinking that you’re on a path, particularly if that path is ordained, if it’s meant to be.

I was pretty sure, for a while at least, that I was on a path into theological education — being a lecturer, a teacher, a thinker, and a writer. I thought that the path I was on, which brought me to Laidlaw College (the Bible college in West Auckland), was one that would take me right through into retirement and beyond.

But it wasn’t to be. So much for being sure of your path.

I quickly found myself on a different path: freelance work, journalism, writing books, and piecemeal projects. But now, I feel like I’ve come to the end of that path. My main employer for the past eight to 10 years has been the Australian subsidiary of News Corp, Rupert Murdoch’s company — I’m ashamed to say. A little while ago, they emailed me and said they would no longer pay me as a New Zealand resident. Company policy is that they don’t pay wages to people living overseas, which is crazy considering they’ve paid me for the best part of a decade while I’ve been living here. It didn’t seem to bother them before. Anyway, they said that I had to move back to Australia, which put a whole lot of things in motion and resulted in me having a one-way ticket to Perth.