Empathy

The fact that he was beholden to no one enthralled her. He stood against the world in the way the world stood against her. He didn’t just ignore their conventions, he made them stare him in the face while he defied them. If it cost him a few months in jail here and there, that was all the more romantic. He wasn’t just words. He was authentic. He was strong enough in some inside place that he didn’t care what anyone thought or what anyone did to him. He would never grant someone else the power control him, to restrain him, to demean him.

Once in a bar she’d wanted to play pool. The guy at the table, part way through his game, was nearly twice his size. Still, just as the man was about to sink a ball, he placed his beer glass over the hole. “My girl wants to play. Now.” The guy got fiery angry, but rather than back down to the giant, her boyfriend took a pool cue and, holding the thin end in his hands, wacked the Goliath across the shoulders. When the giant recovered he curled a massive fist and put it straight to her boyfriend’s face. Even through the blood he stood his ground. He grabbed his beer glass again, and, using it as a club, struck his opponent, who staggered and fell. Then he set up the pool balls, picked up the cue again, and broke, watching the balls scatter, before calling to her and strutting out, back to his truck where he collapsed. She loved that kind of defiance. She knew she could never be that person herself, so it was intoxicating to be with such a person.

You pay a price for the privilege of being near such brilliance and power. Occasionally that uncontrolled passion gets aimed at you. The first time he squeezed his calloused thumbs and fingers around her neck she was going to leave him forever. She could hardly believe now that she had felt that way. How little she’d understood. At the time what brought her back was the realization that she didn’t really have anywhere better to go. She would never find anyone who’d love like he did, who would pay attention to her, who would be jealous for her. It took her longer to really understand. To understand that fits of violence and jealousy, that was part of who he was, and to love him meant to love all of him. She understood now that pain was temporary and that when it’s over, you cannot remember it in the same way you can remember love, your memory does not bring back even a touch of the actual feeling, it’s just fact, something that happened. And she learned that it’s mostly the anticipation of pain, the fear of it, that made her recoil from him and run out when they were first together, not the punch itself.

She also learned that most times it was something that she could have avoided if she’d paid more attention. If she listened to what he told her she should do. If she hadn’t forgotten his instruction or if she’d thought for even a second about how he would feel if she went out with her friends without him. She first realized this one summer night when he’d gone to the bedroom, come out with his loaded pistol, and held the weight of the steel barrel just above her ear. It struck her like a thunderbolt. If she’d listen him when he was calm, if she had not defied him, he wouldn’t have had to get the gun.

What if by loving people we free them?

What if by loving we enable them to love?

What if it is our nature to be able to love only up to the highest level of love we have felt toward ourselves?

1 John 4:19 reports that we love because God first loved us. Does this mean that we cannot start the chain, the circle really; that we are incapable of loving because of something inside of us that is broken, that we first have to be touched by someone else, that we first have to have a switch turned on that enables us, and releases, us to love?

What would that mean for us if we have never really known that we have been loved? And what does it mean for us if we have been taught it wrong . . . if we think love is one thing but it fact it is another, something completely different, or perhaps something that look so very similar but is different in its core essence? A substitute so very similar yet completely at odds?

I think that part of what it means is this: Once we have it, once we know it, once it has become a part of us, once we have recognized and accepted being loved, it is its nature to fundamentally change us. It is a point of no return. It is a transformation. It makes us different people than we were.

If what has touched us is only one of those substitutes, that “love” is something we only seek, and not something we give. A woman who sees love in the form of a man willing to beat her over jealously does not “love” someone else in that way, even though she herself might seek that kind of “love” again. Perhaps this is because she knows in her core that, whatever she might tell herself, this is not love.

I’d like to think that once we’ve been loved and known it, we cannot go back. That it is simply impossible to be again someone who does not know love and therefore who cannot love. Love, once received, becomes part of our identity. There is something essential about it. While love is something that has to touch us, that has to be offered to us, that has to come from without before it can go out from within, nevertheless it has a reserved place within us, an empty chair and table setting. Love doesn’t dig a hole and fill it in. Love fills in a chasm; first by building a bridge across.

What if we find that once we have been loved, once we know love, once love is so deep in our heart that it is part of us, what if we find that we cannot not love? That we can’t not love in any situation. What if love crowds out, or extinguishes, the ability to simply be selfish? That feels, to me, at least unreachable. But what if love does not exist alone? What if it always is intermixed with brokenness? What if the two can cohabit the same space? Isn’t it something more hopeful? Isn’t it something more . . . useful, more . . . possible, more realistic? And so maybe those things we had experienced before were not just a substitute for love. Maybe they had a piece of love, intermixed with a chunk of brokenness. Maybe we can only love up to that level of love we have known, and we fill in the rest with the trash that is laying around. Maybe there is always at least the smallest fragment from which to build that bridge across.

Until we decide to, until we are intentional about it, will we ever love in any way that that we first learned? Without intention we can ever do more than what just happens because it is familiar to us?

And what if that deep longing that love creates is what drives us to God’s purposes?

Isn’t this exactly true?

What if by loving people we free them? Has God, by first loving us, delegated us such power?