Love & Lawlessness

 

Today, I’m recycling a reflection from before I started my blog. It’s based on this quote:

“And because of the increase of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold.” (Matthew 24: 12)

I don’t know why that struck me but it did. What does lawlessness have to do with love? There is some profound connection there, but I don’t want to stress the analogy.

The law referred to here is the Law of Moses, Torah, God’s law, but still, that law functioned exactly as do modern day civil and criminal codes of law. Lawbreakers were punished, not by God, but by others who were also bound by the law and living under its protection.

So how come an increase in lawlessness leads to a loss of love, and coldness of heart? Let me see if I can parse it out.

Right now I am trying to work out how to continue as friends with someone who frequently imposes on my patience, my personal space, and my ability to empathize. I have frequently felt a tension within myself between natural, unforced affection, and the law or rule of probity and respect for others. I would prefer not to have to engage my mind and use my analytical skills to work out the right way to treat someone. It would be so nice if I could simply rely on warmth of feeling without having to use cold reason.

Isn’t that interesting though? It starts to make sense that the increase in lawlessness should cause “love” to become “cold.” It begins to look more like a natural consequence. When some of us depart from the warmth of heart that keeps us in harmony with our fellow human beings; when we are no longer guided by love and affection in our dealings with each other, that’s when we’re left with no recourse but cold reason.

Love and affection can’t be one-sided. Love springs into being in the space between people. One-sided love can never be moore than infatuation.

If lawlessness makes people decide that they can’t afford to care about each other; if we then are prevented from taking part in the mutual regard, affection and fellow feeling that is shared among neighbors, then there’s not much choice left for those of us who still remember what it’s like to be governed by love instead of law; who are still willing to be guided by love.

I’ll say it again— Still willing!— when all around us people are choosing to remain in the realm of emotion; holding anger and hurt in their hearts against those who’ve harmed them by disregarding what is good and right. Sadly, this is the choice that most of us make instinctively.

The other choice is to honor the absence of love by leaving the realm of emotions and choosing our response according to what our reason tells us would be just and suitable. We can never afford to let grief slip sideways to become hate.  Some of us have already decided not to feed the flame of love; we’ve turned their backs on the fire and left the warm room for the outer dark; and so the rest of us must remain and watch the warm flame slowly die.

This second choice is never easy. When it plays out between individuals who have felt true warmth, affection and love between them, but who have never realized that it takes equal and reciprocal effort to keep the flame alive, it is a true tragedy. It is even more poignant when one understands, but the other does not. When one person neglects the flame, it does not matter how hard the other tries, that flame will die. It’s then that love devolves to a set of principles enacted without warmth or comfort. It’s then that the goodness which flows naturally out of the energy of love becomes a cold calculation of justice according to the principles of law. When this plays out in our common life, rather than just between two people, it’s complicated. Many of us do not understand how to take up our share of accountability within a community, or even in a random group of people. We are confused by our own desires, and we don’t understand the concepts of duty, obligation, and responsibility.

When we have never shared equally in any labor of love alongside other people, we can’t understand the graceful and adroit ways that love enlivens our lives, and how love can be both the cause and the means of happiness at one and the same time.

When we forget how love works, then we don’t understand that love is more than just a feeling. We need to pay attention to the way it works:

Love is an endeavor, an action, an operation, a state of being.

Justice becomes our only recourse when we forget that virtue is a response to love; when we stop understanding that honor, honesty, kindness, compassion, and fairness grow out of love, and belong to it.

In the absence of love, all those qualities are lessened; they become like orphan children missing their mother.

It’s then that justice steps in to function as a kind of prosthetic to replace the missing love in our mutual relationships. Unfortunately, in the midst of lawlessness, we often fail to see how necessary justice is—how utterly crucial it is for us to hold to our principles when nothing is left in the empty warehouse of our hearts but the dusty echo of love.

All we can do then is mourn its loss, and make do with nothing more than the cold regard of justice under law.