Be it foolishness or wisdom, I can never tell, but I believe that “True Love” can be a reality. Not the true love of the Twilight saga, which is to be loathed, but the true love that is cemented in place by a decision of the will and the resolve to see it through. It’s no strange thing that marriage—the covenant where two people go in and one person come out—is begun by vows; the heart of true love isn’t a feeling but a commitment fueled by determination. But I don’t know if it’s wise to hope for true love, and this is why:
1. It’s possible, it happens, but it’s about as rare as a dodo bird in the late 17th century. Generally-speaking, putting your hope in something that’s no more common than a hipster at a football game is pretty foolish. Why will we condemn the lottery as an exploiter of the poor when fairy tales and publishing houses exploit the hopeless? We’ll tell someone they’ve lost their marble for playing the lottery, but we’ll validate their hope for true love. Maybe we’re all just blinded, because it’s something we crave in our deepest parts?
2. The world isn’t kind to true love. The world simply doesn’t give a damn. Most of the time your hopes return empty, and when they don’t, you have no guarantee that the hope will be preserved throughout life’s seasons and senselessness. Is it better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all? When two become one and one is taken, there remains half a person, dismembered and hung out to dry. Fairy tales thrive in a world laden with meaning, but our world’s scarred by Death and Decay, and where the lines are blurred, there’s the realm of Disappointment & Despair. Is it even possible to both acknowledge the nature of reality while holding out hope? Can we legitimately be honest with ourselves while simultaneously legitimately hoping for something so far-fetched? But we’re inconsistent creatures. Call it hypocrisy, condemn it as two-facedness, but I think it’s just that we’re confused and muddled people riddled with inconsistencies in Perception and Praxis.
The wrong way to cut through this tension is to revert back to my old ways. As tempting as it is to believe that God has someone in particular for me, and through the kaleidescoping rhythms of life is bringing us together, such backward momentum only draws us further into the darkness. There are no answers in such a backwards movement; two steps back and one step forward is still moving in the wrong direction. I want such a conviction to be true, I’d love it if it were true, but the belief system itself just doesn’t work. Not only is there no biblical evidence for it, but the sad reality of most Christian marriages tells a different story (recent statistics show more unhappy marriages in Christian communities than secular, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s because we’ve swallowed the lie about ‘The One’ and didn’t expect marriage to be hard, since God authored it). The whole belief system, too, is wholly egocentric, where our romantic aspirations become God’s greatest concern to the point that he puts everything else on the backburner to bring two people together. Yes, I believe God works in our lives; yes, I believe that God can and does bless people with spouses; but I don’t believe that there’s “just one” out there who’s perfect, and that God will bring us together in due time. Who we end up marrying—if we reach that point—has less to do with God’s direct involvement in our lives and more to do with our choices, and chance. Sometimes, sure, God may indeed bring two people together (remember Hosea and Gomer? perhaps not the best example, but there’s a lesson there nonetheless), but to make an occasional rule a universal rule is a monstrous misstep in the wrong direction.
So what’re we left with? The tension coupled with the uncertainty. There’re no black-&-white answers, nothing to dispel the riddle of the Unknown. This is as deep as the knife goes, and the beast’s innards are coiled about our feet. The rarity of true love, the world’s apathy towards true love, and the guarantee, irrespective of religious preferences, that there is no guarantee.
Can I move forward into hope? And how to do so without succumbing to fanciful lies spun in gothic castles? Another question: should I move forward into Hope, or is Hope a beast of burden best left tied up and left behind?
No comments:
Post a Comment