Its part of pain and pleasure

“Love until it hurts” said the tumblr. 

A quaint sentiment spoken, I warrant, not during the hurt that loving entails. It’s always easier to speak platitudes and aphorisms that sound profound about situations when you’re not necessarily undergoing them. Much like how I tend to listen to a fellow graduate student-teacher explain a difficult situation involving one of their students, and my advice usually involves a degree of objectivity and detachment that I, were I in the same situation, would find it rather more difficult to express in such a blasé fashion. “Oh, just fail the paper,” I say easily after hearing of a student’s frustrating behavior, but it’s tougher when you’re the one giving the grade and the student shows up in your class every week, when you have to look in their eyes and teach knowing that they likely resent you or at the very least are upset by your actions.

“Love until it hurts.” Admirable, that. Though perhaps overly simplistic. The general idea, as I take it, means that one should love others or things to the point where they matter at a deep level and thus their removal or loss will elicit pain in you. But the way this sound bite comes across is that the object of love is to acquire pain, to stretch out until you feel tendons tearing, to contort your body to the point of injury, to give of yourself until it costs you. Which seems to me a fallacious sentiment to express. No where in God’s word does the injunction appear to love to the point of pain. 

I rather doubt that the writer meant to convey such a meaning. I’m fairly certain that the takeaway intended involves the exhortation to love with abandon, to unstintingly allow yourself to feel deep passion and to commit and express such passion to the object (again I assume this is directed toward a person). Whether it be a spouse or a beloved, a child or a parent, a friend or a coworker, the Christianized version capitalizes on the popular and non-controversial espousal of love as a divine attribute, one that is much less objectionable to unbelievers than God’s righteousness, justice, mercy, grace, and omnipotence. “God is love” offends far fewer casual people than “God is holy” or “God is truth,” so this expression simply takes it and invites the viewer to ponder ways in which s/he does not fully commit their love to their beloved. 

Thus, the more correct wording would probably be, “Don’t be afraid to love until it hurts.” The fallen nature of existence and humanity virtually ensures that harm and injury will come, whether from circumstances of nature or from the actions of other people, and the tendency, the temptation is to recoil, to keep one’s emotions removed and secured behind walls that limit the damage and access to one’s innermost being. But the object of loving someone isn’t oneself; the very nature of the act and attitude of love is directed away from the subject toward the object. Otherwise it’s not really love. If you truly love someone, you allow them access to the depths of your soul and spirit, to the point where they can injure and hurt you by their actions. But of course, their intention should never be to harm you, and those quasi-sadists who insist upon measuring and verifying the love of others for them by hurting them are not really loving the other person, and in all likelihood will lose the love they simultaneously desire and mistrust. 

“Love until it hurts.” I’m hurting right now. I loved a woman and I told her so. She did not feel the same way, and so I’m in pain. One of the questions (and there are many) swirling around my brain ponders, “Was it worth it? Was the love I felt for her worth the present pain I’m experiencing?” The events are still quite fresh, and thus quite raw in my heart, so this may not be the ideal time to explore them, but I’m sure my insight and understanding will wax with more distance. In the meantime it may be interesting to compare notes from my initial reaction to more thoughtful and less emotional ones in the future. 

But the question stands as to whether it was worth it. Note that I harbor no doubts as to whether I should have told her and risked rejection; different reasons drove this decision, but one of them coincided with the above maxim, or at least the modified one: “Don’t be afraid to love until it hurts.” And I have been afraid for a long time about being hurt. My willingness therefore to be vulnerable and to be hurt is a marker of growth for me, and I’m satisfied with that decision. But the question is not concerned with the decision, but rather the emotion and direction of will that compelled it to be made. And for this the answer is less translucent.

One school of thought that immediately occurs to me is the sports/fitness metaphor. To love someone is an emotional muscle that must be exercised in order to grow stronger and healthier. Therefore loving and experiencing loss or disappointed hopes is similar to lifting weights or running and the subsequent aches and pains that follow. Given my willingness to take a risk and chance the pain, I have given my loving mechanism a great workout which will make it heartier the next time, quicker and wiser in choosing an object of affection and tougher in the face of objection or rejection. And while this analogy has some merit, frankly, I regard that as an insufficient reason to expose oneself to risk of emotional injury. 

Another consolation may be forwarded in the guise of the argument, “Well, you put yourself out there, and even if you get rejected, if you were pretty sure such would be the case, you have a better chance of not being rejected than if you never put yourself out there to begin with.” This counter is more satisfying to me for several reason. First, the possibility of pain makes the avoidance of pain and reciprocation of love that much sweeter if it turns out that way. Just like the relief of a gamble increases the more money is riding on it, so the loss-potential can increase the success that occurs. To have your faith rewarded, to expose yourself to risk makes you appreciate it more when the risk pays off. Incidentally, it will also increase the affection one has for the object, seeing that they chose to embrace instead of reject the subject. 

Rich Mullins wrote some wonderful songs, the lyrics of which are the closest contemporary analogues to the old hymns that I’ve encountered. Among the most resonant lyrics for me comes in the song “The Love of God” in which the phrase “the reckless raging fury that they call the love of God” is repeated several times. The idea of the furious nature of God’s love always struck me as curious and not a little unnerving; after all, this God allowed His Son to be murdered by torturous means in order to offer salvation to those very people who murdered him and for whose sake he allowed himself to be murdered. The recklessness of God’s love stuns me whenever I really think about it, which is what Mullins was tapping into, and that same recklessness should permeate our lives and relationships among ourselves and between us and the Lord.

And lest you think that Mullins solely ascribed the ferocity and reckless nature of love to the Father, in his song “Calling Out Your Name” the third verse exclaims: “The Lord takes by its corners this whole world, and shakes us forward and shakes us free to run wild with the hope.” Here the operative word is “hope” but I feel safe in assuming Mullins would have easily transferred a similar ethic to love as well. Not only is God’s love reckless, but He has invited, encouraged, nay, perhaps even mandated that we “run wild” with the love, free from constraints of worry as to what could happen to us. The worst that could happen is to be rejected, emotionally or physically by death. If the second should happen, well, “to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.” If the first, we can rest and recover assured that no matter what earthly tumult and pain may assail us, we can hide and rest in His sheltering arms, secure in our unshakable confidence in His love for us. That is the true heart of the Gospel, that is the good news, and armed with that I will humbly approach each day confident in who I am and my beloved status in Christ before the throne of God.

I’m sure that these words, though spiritually and intellectually true and understood, will at times seem small comfort when the ghostly pain echoes through my soul. Like a splinter removed, the afterimage on one’s emotions of shattered will linger and recur like waves on the sand. But I trust and hope that the tide of affection and the pain of its refusal will, like the tide, recede into the ocean of God’s love and acceptance, immovable as He Himself. Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus.