Do you celebrate Valentine’s Day?
There is a general awareness that days like today can be tough for people, maybe even most people. Valentine’s can be rough for people who don’t see themselves as having a Valentine. It can be rough for people who have suffered loss. It can also be tough for people who are in relationships, but the expectations of the day can lead to tension or disappointment. When you put the word “tough” together with the word “love” even more problems arise.
Do you remember being told in church or elsewhere that love should be tough? Usually this pertained to a parent’s love for a child as some kind of disciplining presence. Love that wasn’t “tough” was seen to be weak or ineffective. As someone who has worked as a pastor in churches for decades, I can assure you that I saw more damage caused by “tough love” than perhaps anything else. I was also familiar with situations in which people in the church were afraid to love a child unconditionally for fear of what others might think of them.
I never really bought the “tough love” concept. It seemed to me to have more to do with fear or even with the parent being overly aware of how they looked in the eyes of others due to the behaviour of their child.
You may be able to think of exceptions, instances when “tough love” makes sense, but I think that, for the most part, we have learned that love is better than “tough.”
In hopeful Christian understanding, the word describing love is not “tough.” It is “unconditional.” In this theology, there is an awareness of the fact that the basis of God’s love is God’s character, not our behaviour or even our response.
On Valentine’s day, here are a couple of Karl Barth quotes offered to inspire us to a hopeful understanding of love:
“To the extent that you cling to the result of your loving, you will not love, and you will destroy the very thing to which you cling. We cannot love in order to achieve something … Love is betrayed if we try to make it the object of this type of calculation.”
“We cannot insist too sharply that we do not love for any external reason, with any ulterior motive, or in execution of any design or purpose. The one who loves does not want anything except to love, except more fully and seriously and perfectly to give themselves, to enter into relationship with the loved one. If there is any other plan or project - however noble - it means that love is betrayed and ended.”
It turns out that unconditional love like this comes from freedom on the part of the one who is loving. Barth was big on this. God’s love is the demonstration of sovereignty. That is, it is not based in our behaviour or worthiness. It turns out, also, that unconditional love opens the space for freedom on the part of the one who receives love. This freedom allows for a response of love. If there is, as the quote above states, calculation before love, then there can be no true freedom. I suppose, if love is “tough” at all, it is tough decidedly on the one who is doing the loving. For those who identify with the Christian faith, we can see how this is true in the example of Jesus Christ.
Blessings for a meaningful Valentine’s Day, even if it’s tough.