What Does Real Love Look Like And How Can We Get It?
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(OPINION) One track from the soundtrack of my childhood is Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s classic song, “What the World Needs Now Is Love.” It was a top-10 hit in 1965 for singer Jackie DeShannon and later was covered by Dionne Warwick.
If you’re of a certain vintage, you surely remember the opening lyrics: “What the world needs now is love, sweet love. It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.”
The ’60s were tumultuous. Even to a kid, it sometimes seemed the world had lost its mind. We had urban riots, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, civil rights demonstrations, mass shootings and multiple assassinations. All going on at once.
And in the midst of the chaos, for several years — at least as my aging memory has compressed it — you couldn’t flip on the radio without hearing those plaintive, haunting lyrics: “What the world needs now is love, sweet love,” a soft rebuke to the nightly news.
Today, living in another tumultuous time, I find the notes same coming back to me.
Love sure didn’t save the ’60s, but wouldn’t it be nice to imagine love might save us now?
Yeah, I know it’s too much to ask. Humans by and large aren’t geared that way. But an old man can dream just as easily as a 9-year-old can.
I think sometimes that part of what keeps love from winning on this troubled planet is that most of us don’t even understand what true love looks like, much less how to get it.
For me the best concept of love is the Christian one, even if, unfortunately, Christians don’t comprehend or practice it better than anybody else does.
But if we did, it might make a noticeable difference in — well, in just about everything. Politics. Marriage. Parenting. Business. Social justice. It’s hard to think of an arena Christian love wouldn’t improve, if only we would attempt it.
The early followers of Jesus appropriated a word for love that wasn’t unique to them, but was certainly rare. They chose the Greek word “agape.”
Agape wasn’t sexy, literally or figuratively. It didn’t make hormones shoot across your nerve endings like Roman candles, the way romantic love can. It didn’t melt you with tenderness and tears, either, the way seeing your newborn does.
It had little to do with emotions, actually. It was an act of the will. With agape, you simply chose to treat another person lovingly no matter what you thought of him in the moment. It meant that, as Jesus had said, if your enemy was hungry, you fed him. Period.
The recipient of your act of agape might continue to be your enemy. He might be odious, a lying, thieving wretch. Nonetheless, you were to treat him the way someone who deeply cared for him would treat him — his mom, maybe. Or God.
There’s a famous passage from the New Testament I’d wager almost everybody has heard, even the most secular of us. It’s commonly read at weddings, even though it wasn’t written specifically for newlyweds. It was for everybody.
I’m speaking of the“love chapter,” 1 Corinthians 13, which begins:
“If I speak with the tongues of mankind and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give away all my possessions to charity, and if I surrender my body so that I may glory, but do not have love, it does me no good.”
It continues:
“Love is patient, love is kind, it is not jealous; love does not brag, it is not arrogant. It does not act disgracefully, it does not seek its own benefit; it is not provoked, does not keep an account of a wrong suffered.”
What often escapes notice is that in the ancient Greek manuscripts on which the English translations are based, the word used here for love is — yep — agape.
St. Paul wasn’t telling newlyweds or anyone else that they’d live in such a divine fog they wouldn’t notice if their precious apple dumpling started flirting with a former lover.
Instead, he was saying that even if said spouse was acting like a Class A idiot, the offended partner should address the matter gently, graciously and fairly. The offended one should seek a calm reconciliation and try not to hold a grudge. He or she should act in ways consistent with love.
All this would require a conscious choice, and maybe some teeth-gritting, because the aggrieved party probably wouldn't feel too saintly at that moment.
As said, then, agape was and is unsexy. It’s clear-eyed. Bottom line: Do the loving thing even if you feel like strangling the fool.
Arguably, it’s the only kind of love that really works over the long haul. Because if you love people solely when they act lovably or when you feel like showing them love, there won’t be much love going on.
Can you imagine how agape might reform our toxic politics? How it might restore relationships between parents and rebellious children? How it might improve employee-management relations?
What the world needs now, and always has, is agape, sweet agape.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.