My New Year's Resolution

So I told you about my new thing for respect and how it would be best to resolve to show a whole lot of respect.

It was a great NPR essay, I think, but for the moment I'm casting it to the wind. My new thing is showing love. My New Year's Resolution is to love more and better.

Love is the trickiest art out there, without doubt. It's really at the center of most things we do; that is, being happy is loving your job, being in a good loving relationship, showing love to your kids (even when it means punishing them), loving God if you're religious, maybe loving Ideas if you're not. Love is the primary subject matter on the radio (even in the guise of promiscuous sex - trust me, man does not live by nookie alone). Love infects our films. Love saturates our stories. Love changes us - and that's heavy.

Even the Apostle Paul knew it - and I think he's somebody that many of us trust. Love, he says, is the greatest thing among some pretty great things: the competition is fierce when you're up against Hope and Faith. But Love is, for Paul, the one that wins out. And I think he's right. And I think God agrees.

I also like what Don Miller has to say about love in Blue Like Jazz: that too many of us use love like currency. Give as a reward, withhold as punishment. Smile at the people you like, thumb your nose at the people you don't. Draw a line in the sand. Scorn the other side. I want to take it further: using love to divide happens even by using its conceptual entity as a divider. I must confess to loving that bumper sticker that says "When Jesus said to love people, I think he meant don't kill them." I even think that this is a message we should champion and put out there - but maybe the bumper sticker method isn't the best approach: comedian Demetri Martin suggests that bumper stickers are a sort of a shortcut, a quick way of saying "Hey - let's never hang out." Love? Maybe not.

Don Miller also says that he thinks Jesus calls us to make love a true, selfless gift - not currency. Jesus calls us to love one another without condition. That means, if necessary, loving contrary to pre-conceived notion. That means, if necessary, putting aside political differences (!). That means loving everybody and meaning the every part. Tricky, tricky. Trickier than Faith or Hope.

So here's what I say. I love you. I think that having this blog enables me to say that to a lot of people without enduring the awkwardness that would come with professing my love in person. And maybe that's a cop-out. But the truth of the matter is I'm not going to tell everybody that I love them.

I'm going to show them; at least, I'm going to try.

So, that gay-bashing, economy-worshipping, Bush-believing idiot over there? Love her/him. That contemporary church that keeps stealing our members? Love 'em. Every one. That unbelievably stupid, worthless, frustrating teacher? Love her/him. That jackass "friend" who gets every ounce of my effort and returns none of the niceties? Love her/him. I've got to do it; at least, I've got to try. It's what makes the most sense, even though it's tricky. Trickier than Faith or Hope.

I also want to point out why I began this entry by speaking a bit negatively about my respect post: Respect is not enough. Anne Lamott says you can love someone and not have any particular desire to meet him/her for lunch. We have to LOVE everyone. We can't love the people we want and respect the people we don't: that would be awfully civil and really rather admirable. But we must strive for more.

You can love someone without wanting to go to lunch with them - God, I love Anne Lamott.

Come to think of it, I love you too. God bless you.