At its highest, love is not a spontaneous feeling. There is nothing spontaneous about an egalitarian community of comrades—it requires hard work and full commitment. There is nothing spontaneous even about sexual love, which is only ever satisfied by the proof that it is, at bottom, a free and deliberate choice: even among non-religious people, sex either tends toward something like a marriage vow or becomes spiteful, cruel, not-love. This is why love can and should be paradoxically commanded: “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you” (John 15:12). True love is a practice, a fundamental mode of dealing with another person.
True love is hard, then, tough—not sentimental. How does love look when we do not perform it as though obeying a divine command? Neil Gaiman perfectly described how spontaneous love ends up:
Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up a whole suit of armor, for years, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They don’t ask for it. They do something dumb one day, like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like “Maybe we should be just friends” ... turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain.... I hate love.
This is a correct description of love as a self-destructive human passion lacking the divine dimension. To attain true love, we have to reach beyond humanism: even loving directly all of humanity is not enough. Christ has to be here. (Recall what Gilbert Keith Chesterton said: “Christ did not love humanity, He never said He loved humanity; He loved men. Neither He nor anyone else can love humanity; it is like loving a gigantic centipede.”)
Why do we need Christ and his difficult command to love? Because we are…
