Here you can find Mike Boucher’s monthly guidelines for Small Christian Communities.
FEBRUARY 2022 Guidelines:
February 2022 Guidelines Word Doc Download
Dear Friends in the Journey,
These days, I find myself reflecting on a few things.
First, I can’t believe that it is already February.
Second, at least where we are in Monroe County, COVID infections seem to be decreasing giving some increased hope that we might be moving past this surge and into another way of being. I do not say “getting back to normal” because I don’t think we’re ever going back to the life we knew a few years ago. So much has changed and/or remains in flux that there is no going back. But, at the same time, the possibilities for more usual social interactions may be returning.
Third, in our consumer culture, as soon as the Christmas decorations are put away, we’re on to the next “holiday” – that being Valentine’s Day. February hosts the celebration of love in our culture – a celebration that I find quite curious considering the origins of the Valentine’s story. But that seems to be something that our wider culture does. It takes things that have deep and powerful roots and offers us a watered down version of it that has vestiges of the original but lacking in so much of its power and transformational capacity.
February is also Black History Month and remains a time to explore our common history and the cultural achievements of the African diaspora that have been routinely and systematically ignored, erased and marginalized. I encourage everyone reading these reflections to attend or take in as much as you can during this month (as it remains a time of increased programming and events) and extend that into every other month of the year.
In these guidelines, we’re going to take up the theme of love. Lately I have been re-reading the work of the great author and public intellectual bell hooks (who recently passed away) in one of her books on love called All About Love: New Visions (Edward Morrow, 2001). I find it a profound reflection on love and one that I know I will return to again and again.
But back to Valentine’s Day for a second…While our modern celebration is all about candy, sweetness and demonstrations of love and affection, the origins had a rather different flavor.
Valentine’s Day as a holiday is steeped in mystery and legend. From what I can discern, there actually was a person named Valentine (may have been a few of them…) who was martyred related to his Christian faith by the Romans in the 3rd century CE. A bunch of stories emerged about what happened to this person, but no one seems able to settle on one story. In fact the Catholic Church removed “St. Valentine” from the canon of saints in 1969, BUT it seems that Valentine’s Day speaks to something much deeper in us.
There’s also the story that the Romans celebrated a somewhat debaucherous feast of love and fertility called Lupercalia around the same dates. This included some animal sacrifices and other rituals that the early Christians found offensive so they introduced this “tamer” version in order to help the Romans assimilate into the religion more easily.
But as far as the modern idea of Valentine’s Day, it seems that we have the English poet Chaucer to thank. In the Cantebury Tales, Chaucer introduces the idea of Valentine and the birds mating in February and the idea caught on in his readers. People started to use the occasion of February to write love notes and give expressions of love to each other.
So whatever it is we’re celebrating on Valentine’s Day, it may be worthwhile to look more deeply into love and see what this might offer us in our own context!
Blessings,
Mike Boucher
I. Fire-Starter Questions
1. What do you think of when you hear the word love?
2. Are there different kinds of love in your life? How do you distinguish them?
3. How is love portrayed in our wider culture? To what extent does this resonate with your lived experience?
II. Some Scripture Passages for Reflection
1 Corinthians 13: 4 – 8
Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have. Love doesn’t strut, Doesn’t have a swelled head, Doesn’t force itself on others, Isn’t always “me first,” Doesn’t fly off the handle, Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others, Doesn’t revel when others grovel, Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, Puts up with anything, Trusts God always, Always looks for the best, Never looks back, But keeps going to the end. Love never dies.
John 13: 34
Jesus said, “Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples—when they see the love you have for each other.”
1 John 3: 18 – 20
My dear children, let’s not just talk about love; let’s practice real love. This is the only way we’ll know we’re living truly, living in God’s reality. It’s also the way to shut down debilitating self-criticism, even when there is something to it. For God is greater than our worried hearts and knows more about us than we do ourselves.
III. Some Questions for Reflection
1. In this translation of this famous passage from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, what stands out for you? Are there one or two aspects of love that you would like to live into more fully?
2. What would tell you that two people love each other? How would you know that the love spoken of in John 13 is present in a family, an organization, a neighborhood or a community?
3. Who are some people who were models for you in the “practice” of love? What does this passage suggest about the relationship of love and self-criticism and worry?
IV. Commentary
One of my favorite passages from bell hooks’ book is the following:
Everywhere we learn that love is important, and yet we are bombarded by its failure. In the realm of the political, among the religious, in our families, and in our romantic lives, we see little indication that love informs decisions, strengthens our understanding of community, or keeps us together. This bleak picture in no way alters the nature of our longing. We still hope that love will prevail. We still believe in love’s promise.
I have found this to be true time and time again. We keep hoping that love will prevail and keep believing in love’s promise.
hooks also goes on to say that, “To know love we have to tell the truth to ourselves and to others.”
So let me start by telling a little truth about love.
In English, we have just one word for it. In other languages, like Greek, they had many. I actually think having multiple words to speak about the experience would be more useful for us so that we could more precisely differentiate but also so that we could more precisely develop spiritually.
I came across a brief article by Roman Krznaric from Sojourners magazine entitled “Have You Tried the Six Varieties of Love” [1] that does a great job of laying out some of the different words for love in Greek.[2]
Krznaric identifies the following:
Eros: Named after the Greek god of fertility, this love represented the idea of sexual passion and desire. Eros was viewed by the Greeks as a somewhat dangerous, fiery and irrational form of love that could take hold of you and possess you.
Philia: Most closely defined as friendship, this love was valued more than the base sexuality of eros. Philia concerned the deep bond between people and was about showing loyalty to your friends, sacrificing for them, as well as sharing your emotions with them. Stoge – closely related to philia – was the special love between parent and child.
Ludus: This was the Greek’s idea of playful love, which referred to the playful affection between children or young lovers. The Greeks also saw ludus in things like flirtation, public dancing and fun communal activities.
Agape: Perhaps the most radical kind of love because it was known as selfless love. This was a love that you extended to all people, whether family members or distant strangers. It is closely associated with ideas like “loving-kindness” in Buddhism.
Pragma: This was known as mature love. This was the deep understanding that developed between couples in long-term relationships. It was about making compromises to help the relationship work over time, and showing patience and tolerance.
Philautia: This focused on self-love. The Greeks differentiated, however, between unhealthy self- love (known as narcissism or self-obsession) and another form of self-love that actually enhanced your capacity to love others.
Just take in that list for a minute. How might that help us to collectively have more words for love? What might it open up for us spiritually or practically?
What I have noticed is that our culture focuses so heavily on romantic love and eros-type love. Just look at the magazine covers, rom-com movies and relationship blogs. We’re preoccupied with sex, soul-mates and falling in love with a romantic partner. And while I don’t want to downplay the importance of these in our lives, the Greeks actually help us see and name a much larger conversation related to love that can enhance our abilities to recognize, cultivate and celebrate other amazing forms of love. Love is not just one thing.
Back to bell hooks…
In All About Love, she touches upon a lot of what the Greeks were getting at. For example, she says things like:
Living life in touch with divine spirit lets us see the light of love in all living beings.
Love as an active force that should lead us into greater communion with the world…Loving practice is not aimed at simply giving an individual greater life satisfaction; it is extolled as the primary way we end domination and oppression. This important politicization of love is often absent from today’s writing.
To live our lives based on the principles of a love ethic (showing care, respect, knowledge, integrity, and the will to cooperate), we have to be courageous.
Most of us are raised to believe we will either find love in our first family (our family of origin) or, if not there, in the second family we are expected to form through committed romantic couplings, particularly those that lead to marriage and/or lifelong bondings. Many of us learn as children that friendship should never be seen as just as important as family ties. However, friendship is the place in which a great majority of us have our first glimpse of redemptive love and caring community. Learning to love in friendships empowers us in ways that enable us to bring this love to other interactions with family or with romantic bonds…Committed love relationships are far more likely to become codependent when we cut off all our ties with friends to give these bonds we consider primary our exclusive attention…What we learn through experience is that our capacity to establish deep and profound connections in friendship strengthens ‘ all our intimate bonds. To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not Just romantic bonds.
In her words I hear powerful echoes of philia, pragma and agape, and her writings about self-love – especially as a Black woman living in the United States with all of its complicated history of racial harm – is also a very powerful reflection and makes plain that “self-love” and love of others is not the same process for all of us (given the various oppressions that people are subjected to in our world).
What I also appreciate about hooks’ writing is that she clearly names the impacts of social forces on our ability and capacity to love and on our spiritual lives. She says that,
A culture that is dead to love can only be resurrected by spiritual awakening. On the surface it appears that our nation has gone so far down the road of secular individualism, worshiping the twin gods of money and power, that there seems to be no place for spiritual life. Yet an overwhelming majority of Americans who express faith In Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, or other religious traditions clearly believe that spiritual life is important. The crisis of American life does not seem to be generated by a lack of interest in spirituality. However, this interest is constantly co-opted by the powerful forces of materialism and hedonistic consumerism.
And this is where I’d invite us to pause for a moment.
hooks is helping us to recognize that, even if we are interested in “loving” better, our interest and practice is constantly co-opted by things like materialism and consumerism (sounds A LOT like MLK’s naming of the “giant triplets of evil” – materialism, racism and militarism…).[3]
This is why I think returning to the Greek words for love and passages like the scriptures we read help us to move towards the “spiritual awakening” that she speaks of. They take us out of a sentimental, surface-level, commodified version of love and re-place us back in the difficult but soul-satisfying practices of love – loving even when we are tired, loving even when people hurt us, and loving in ways that change the world around us. As hooks says, these kinds of loving take courage, and this is the kind of loving that Jesus taught us.
bell hooks also reminds us that we often opt for a watered down version of love because we “do not want to do the work that love demands. When the practice of love invites us to enter a place of potential bliss that is at the same time a place of critical awakening and pain, many of us turn our backs on love.” True love – while it might provide us with forms of bliss and security – requires a critical awakening and pain because true love invites us beyond where we are right now.
And yet love will not ask for our diminishment in order to awaken us. We are told that love is patient and kind, and when we look at the life of Jesus we see that love is invitational. Even if the truths we are invited to embody are costly, we are not shamed or shunned into love.
If we take the words from Corinthians and the two other readings and kind of boil them down into some more succinct form, we might hear:
Love doesn’t strut and doesn’t force itself on others
It doesn’t fly off the handle or keep the score
Love doesn’t want others to grovel and only takes pleasure in other people flowering
Love looks for the best and does not look back
Love cares for others more than self
But does not ask for self-criticism
Or that we treat ourselves poorly
Love never gives up and it never dies
It is a practice
That others can see and notice
This is God’s reality – a love reality
That knows us better than we know ourselves
The only ask
Is that we pass on the love
That has been shown to us
So when Valentine’s Day rolls around in the next few weeks, maybe we take time out to think about the many words of love and to think what each might require of us.
In which areas are we developed?
In which areas are we underdeveloped?
What might each of these loves “look” like in terms of how we use our time, our privilege, our money?
What invitation does each love offer to us for our lives?
Who do you look to as teachers of love?
V. Action Step
One action I will take after reading these reflections is….
[1] https://sojo.net/articles/have-you-tried-six-varieties-love
[2] I have also seen various numbers related to Greek words for love ranging from 4 to 8! So I will leave it to the Greek speakers and scholars to settle that debate…
[3] Here I also think about Cornell West’s famous phrase, “Justice is what love looks like in public…” We can’t separate love from equity, justice and social restructuring.