Via Sullivan, I read just now this reflection on love by Tony Woodlief, a Christian who has known great suffering, including the death of a child. Excerpt from a passage that starts by his quoting Walker Percy:

“The great poets and novelists always wrote about the nature of God and love, of man and woman. But how can even Dante write about the love of God, the love of a man for a woman, if he lives in a society in which God is the cheapest word of the media, as profaned by radio preachers as by swearing. And ‘love?’ Love is the way sit-com plots and soap operas get resolved a hundred times a week.”

This is why writers turn to parody, and satire, and derision, Percy wrote, because the true things have been so corrupted, and everyone seems to be colluding in their corruption. So the writer feels he must “mock and subvert the words and symbols of the day in order that new words come into being or that old words be freshly minted.”

And so there is this old word called love, and what can we say of it, now? It has been perverted, by songs and books and perhaps worst of all by that variety of Orwellian preacher who crafts a hateful god and calls him Love. It has been perverted by every one of us who has whispered it without meaning it, who let it become passive feeling instead of convicted action.

This morning Bishop Thomas was in our parish preaching on the divine command to love one’s neighbor, even one’s enemies. He told a story about a famous and brilliant convert to Orthodoxy who publicly referred to the head of another church as a “heretic.” Technically, the man in the other church was a heretic, but Bishop Thomas said he ordered this man, who was his godson, to quit using that term for the other churchman. The bishop told us that he has never known anyone who came to the Orthodox faith, or to faith at all, by being told what idiots they are for not believing. If we really take loving our enemies seriously, the bishop said, we must see everyone as people who are on a journey to the truth, and to whom God may have sent us to help love them along the way. Love isn’t an emotional disposition; it’s an action, it’s doing the right thing by our neighbors, no matter how difficult it is.

“I’m not asking you pretty-please to love your neighbor,” the bishop told us. “I am telling you to love your neighbor.” To do anything less, he said, is to deny ourselves the inheritance that is due us as children of God. Interesting and difficult point: to fail to do the hard thing and love our neighbors, even if they are our enemies, is to cheat oneself out of the treasure God has laid up for us.