What Does “Loving Thy Neighbor” Actually Look Like?

Hey, there. I’m back from the trenches of King County elections. Election night was frenzied: I spent the evening fighting with printers and filing change-of-address forms and didn’t have a second to check my phone until I got the train at 9:30pm. Highly recommend!

When I got home, I was thrilled to find out that candidates like James Talarico had flipped conservative seats, joining a group of "Matthew 25 Christians” who are representing their faith not through restricting the rights of their fellow Americans, but by advocating for social programs like universal healthcare and increasing food aid to the poor. In fact, many Talarico campaign signs simply bore the phrase, “love thy neighbor.”

I’m cautiously optimistic about this group of legislators, but they face a lot of obstacles. Will they be able to break the GOP’s stranglehold over white evangelicals? Will they hold to their principals, or will this end up being just another case of politicians wrapping themselves in the mantle of Christianity? Only time will tell.

Meanwhile, I want to examine what this Bible-verse-turned-campaign-slogan really means. What does it actually look like to love your neighbor? And is love really that big of a deal?

Wannabe Bohemians

In the summer of 2001, vibrating with excitement, my friends (a gaggle of theater kids) and I plopped into movie theater seats and watched, rapt as the opening credits of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge took us to 19th-century Paris. Weeping over his typewriter, Ewan MacGregor gasped, “The greatest gift you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.”

Over the next two hours, we became Bohemians: dedicated to the ideals of beauty, truth, freedom, love…and, presumably, absinthe and Elton John covers.

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At 16, I was feeling trapped by a family that was more focused on projecting material success than meeting its members’ emotional needs. I yearned for the freedom I saw onscreen. Driving back and forth to my rural high school, I blasted RENT on my car stereo and even dug into La Bohème, its operatic source material. In my family, money was often a means of control, so I would prove that I didn’t need it. I would break free, no matter what.

Now in my forties, I look back on that 16-year-old with both admiration and amusement. It’s certainly easy to romanticize poverty when you’ve never been broke, as I would come to learn.

Still, I kinda think the movie was right about love? Loving and being loved, that’s what so much of life comes down to. And for many of us, love is something we have to consciously pursue, practice, and get better at.

What is Love?

(Apologies if I just ear wormed you or gave you Night at the Roxbury flashbacks.)

For something that is so central to a meaningful life, there isn’t a lot of cultural consensus about what love actually is. How do we define it? As feeling? Verb? Do you know it when you see it?

As the American philosopher, bell hooks, writes in her book, All About Love,

“My work as a cultural critic offered me a constant opportunity to pay close attention to everything the mass media, particularly movies and magazines, tell us about love. Mostly they tell us that everyone wants love but that we remain totally confused about the practice of love in everyday life. In popular culture love is always the stuff of fantasy.”

(emphasis mine.)

If you grew up attending church, you’ve probably learned about “love languages” and about the seven different words used for love in ancient Greek, which is the language the New Testament was written in.

Most of the pastors I’ve heard on the subject take pains to denote the difference between “eros” (defined as romantic/erotic love) vs. “agape” which is a universal, altruistic form of love that a person feels for God, other humans, and for nature. Our culture spends a lot of time building monuments to eros and idealizing familial love, but other types of love go largely unrecognized.

I wonder whether this ambiguity leads to fewer and weaker connections. We seem to be in a moment of flux. Many people want more community, but we’re unsure what we owe other people or how best to show up. Maybe learning about what love is (and what it isn’t) can guide us towards the kind of meaningful, connected lives we want to be living.

Studying Love

In the weeks leading up to the holidays, let’s learn about LOVE. Here are some questions I have:

* How do we define love?

* Do we ‘owe’ love to others? What if they don’t act lovingly towards us?

* How do we balance loving others and loving ourselves?

* Can love and abuse coexist, or does the presence of abuse negate love?

* How do people learn to love if we grew up with imperfect models?

* Does our culture put too much emphasis on romantic love to the exclusion of other types?

Can “found family” be an adequate substitute for broken familial relationships?

And here are some resources I’m looking at:

* the story of The Good Samaritan

* bell hooks’ All About Love

* Esther Perel’s Mating in Captivity

And I’m thinking of these quotes:

* “Happy people love people, use things and find meaning beyond themselves. Unhappy people use people, love things and seek meaning in themselves.” —Arthur Brooks

* “An old Indian saying puts it more bluntly: The worst thing that can be said about a person is, ‘He acts like he has no relatives.’” —Randy Woodley

What questions do you have about love? What else should I be reading/watching/listening to as we explore this topic? As always, I’m happy to hear from you in the comments or via DM or email.

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BONUS MATERIALS:

* this article on the 7 types of love according to Greek philosophy is worth a read

* gift link to NYT article on Matthew 25 legislators

* just for teehees