Can Love Be Saved?
Recently I was speaking with a friend of mine who is a hospital chaplain. She was lamenting how challenging it is sometimes to bring a prayerful presence to the patients, many of whom may not share her faith — or hold any faith at all. To illustrate this, she reflected on a dying person she met recently, who shared how difficult it was for him to believe in God. He wasn’t hostile to the idea of God, just had difficulty offering God any kind of faith.
As I listened to my friend, I thought of many conversations I’ve had over the years with people who do not share my faith or my interest in mysticism and contemplation. Unlike some Christians, I don’t believe God is punitive, so I don’t feel any need to convince agnostics or atheists that they should believe. If anything, I am more likely to acknowledge the fact that doubt, and even disbelief, are normal responses to the essential mystery of a hidden God.
So I said to my chaplain friend, “Here’s how I might have responded to that particular situation. I might have said, ‘I actually agree with you, I’m not sure if I believe in God or not, but you know, I do believe in love.’” It seemed to me that for many people, love might be an easier topic to wrap their heads around instead of God. My chaplain friend agreed, and our conversation wandered off to other topics.
But I kept thinking about this, because I know that things are more complicated than just “Love is a more palatable name for God.” How I wish it were that easy!
In 1960, C. S. Lewis published a book called The Four Loves, based on several different Greek words for love; in it he explores empathy, friendship, eros, and generous self-giving love (in the Greek, agápē) to explain how love is like light: we can refract light into all the colors of the rainbow, and in a similar way, love can be refracted into different dimensions of kindness, compassion and care. Agápē represents the love of God, the love that is God. But it seems to me that in our public intellectual life, we have lost sight of the many nuances of (and in) love, and perhaps this loss has made our society the poorer.
For you see, I’ve noticed a rather distressing trend in the almost 20 years that I have been a contemplative writer and retreat leader. Early on in my work, people always seemed to appreciate this idea that another name for God is “Love.” Indeed, I got into the habit of describing God as “Love-with-a-capital-L” or perhaps “Love-with-a-face.”
Generally speaking, people seemed to accept and even love this. For Christians, it was simply a restatement of the fourth chapter of the first letter of John, which bluntly states “God is love” — the only time in the entire Bible when God is specifically defined. The Bible never says “God is male” or “God is almighty” or “God is judgmental” (thank heaven), but it does say God is love. And the love that John links to God is agápē love: Theos agapé estin (Θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν), “God is love.”
Even for people who do not identify as Christians, equating love with God often seems to make sense: for they might not have faith in God, but they generally did seem to put faith in love.
Ah, but what a difference a decade or so can make.
I don’t remember the first time I noticed somebody pushing back on me about my use of the word “Love.” It was before the pandemic, but not long before: so sometime after 2015. I was flummoxed. The person said something to the effect of, “But what is love?” A fair enough question, and I patiently explained that I wasn’t talking about superficial romance, or the confusion of affection and eroticism, but rather that I understood love in a spiritual sense to refer to infinite compassion, mercy and care. The person seemed to accept my answer but it was clear that he didn’t much care for the word love. I found this rather unsettling, but at the time I chalked it up to one individual’s quirkiness. After all, maybe he had never experienced real love, so no wonder he wasn’t comfortable with the word.
I wish I could say that was an isolated incident, but unfortunately it has happened several more times over years that followed. Thankfully, it’s still not the norm: it seems that most people who are interested in contemplative and mystical writing and retreats have a sense of love as a spiritually meaningful and positive concept — but the pushback against love has happened often enough that I have begun to worry: are we, as a culture, beginning to lose our faith not only in God but even in love?
I think there’s plenty of evidence to back up this question. All one has to do is spend a little bit of time on social media — especially the more partisan apps — to see how much rancor and vitriol has become the normal tone for our social discourse. Granted, social media is a place where we can create anonymous or masked personas for ourselves, which makes it more possible for people to indulge in anger, cynicism, and even sheer hate when communicating. But compare that to the way I (and I presume many people) was brought up: my family taught me that in public, or among strangers, I was expected to be on my best behavior, not my worst!
Friends, if the kind of discourse we see on social media represents people’s best behavior, then our society is in deep trouble indeed.
Then there’s the question of how we frame the stories that we tell ourselves merely for entertainment’s sake. I’m a lifelong fan of Star Trek, old enough to remember when the original series was first broadcast on prime time television. For many years, Star Trek and its various spin off series has always had a fairly clear moral center: the federation were the good guys, the Klingons and the Romulans and the Borg were the bad guys, and then there were some in-between folks like the Ferengi or the Q Continuum. But beginning with Deep Space 9 in the late 1990s, Star Trek began to explore more grey areas in its storytelling: with characters and storylines that didn’t always fit neatly into a “white hat/black hat” template. Fast forward to 2025, when the latest Star Trek movie, Section 31, features a complex story arc about a morally compromised character — who had been a violent tyrant in a parallel universe — with a clear sense that her ambiguity was part of her charm — and her strength as a protagonist. And while I would like to see this as an anomaly, I’m afraid that other entertainment franchises, such as the Marvel Comics Universe or Star Wars, also seems to follow this complex-is-better-than-good trajectory. Perhaps in a world where moral complexity is practically a requirement for today’s entertainment, the old notion of good-versus-evil seems rather quaint, if not naive — or even politically incorrect (after all, a common plot device nowadays is the idea that the “bad guys” aren’t really so bad, they’ve just been traumatized or misunderstood; which could be seen as a welcome invitation into a more nuanced type of storytelling, but which also seems to suggest that no one has any real moral agency any more — since no one is truly good, and those who make bad choices always have an excuse to explain away their behavior).
Do we no longer believe that it is possible to be truly good? Or truly loving, kind, and compassionate? Have we as a society become so cynical that we automatically assume that anyone who is being nice or kind to us must be working some sort of angle, they’ve got some sort of self-interest at play behind their apparent kindness? Has our society come to this?
All of which leads me to the main point I want to discuss in this article: can love be saved?
It seems to me that many people — at least in the circles I move in — lament how divided, polarized, and hyper-partisan our society has become. Not only are we furious in our conviction that “the other side” is wrong, and has dangerous policies or values that hurt people, but we have gradually escalated our views of “the other guys” — once upon a time Democrats and Republicans viewed each other as political rivals or perhaps adversaries, but from there we began to see our opponents as our enemies — and these days, it seems, we see our enemies as demons.
Jesus taught us to love our enemies, but he never said anything about loving demons. So when we begin to see “the other side” as spawns of Satan, suddenly we are liberated from the Christian mandate to love them.
Or are we?
Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that if you want to be a follower of the 1st-century rabbi from Nazareth, among the moral mandates that you’ve signed up for our commitments not only to love your enemies, but also to judge no one, to forgive lavishly and repeatedly, and to balance your commitment to justice with an equally boundless commitment to mercy.
You could throw in some other values, like empathy, civility, kindness, and trust. Ironically, it seems that the very values that appear to be in really short supply in our society today are precisely the values that Jesus himself promoted so consistently during his teaching ministry.
But don’t many people, on both sides of the political divide, continue to identify as Christians? Don’t many people argue that what America needs is a restoration of old-fashioned religious values? Sure, many people do — but I rather think that for many people, Christianity has become a kind of symbol for the rightness of their cause — and it seems that too many people tune out as soon as they realize that Christianity also demands such things as being kind to those who are different from us, or practicing a life radically committed to peace and mercy.
I have long said that you can’t judge the quality of a piano if the person playing it doesn’t know how to play a piano (or can’t play it very well). And it seems to me that too many people, across the political spectrum, are quick to invoke Christianity and God as being “on their side” but slow to actually embrace and embody the fullness of Jesus’s teachings.
From the vantage point of this contemplative author, we seem to be in a mess. Our culture increasingly seems to have forgotten core values like compassion, empathy, kindness and forgiveness — not to mention love; and even people who claim to be followers of Jesus often are ignorant of, or even explicitly hostile to, these values.
So how do we get out of this mess? To stay with my metaphor, we need to learn how to play the piano well. The Buddhist author Shunryu Suzuki write a classic book called Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. In his words, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.” So even if someone has been practicing a skill (like Zen meditation) for many years, Suzuki encouraged his readers to adopt a “beginner’s mind” attitude toward the practice. Meditate with the open-ended possibilities of a beginner, even if you have been at it for many years now.
Whether we identify as Christian or not, I believe we all need to approach the spiritual principles of “love your neighbor as yourself” and “love your enemies” with beginner’s mind. Perhaps this is part of what Jesus meant when he instructed his followers to “become like children” — he wasn’t trying to get us to be submissive, but rather to adopt beginner’s mind.
Be a beginner at love. Be a beginner at kindness. Be a beginner at empathy. When one is a beginner, one seeks to learn. We, individually and collectively, need to re-learn what it means to be people who love: people who are kind, compassionate, caring, forgiving, and empathetic. This doesn’t meant that all our conflicts, or our political divisions, will magically disappear. On the contrary, the issues that we are passionate about will remain as pressing as ever. But we need to engage in the challenging task of addressing our conflicts and divisions with the beginner’s mind sensibility that every human being is deeply loved by God, which means none of us are demons (even if some of us do terrible things), and none of us are beyond deserving care and compassion. This may seem to be a tall order, especially given how fractured our society currently is. But it seems to me that we have only two choices: we start doing the hard work of restoring kindness and compassion in our society, or else we continue down the path of increasing aggression, hostility, and hatred.
In the classic Buddhist text Dhammapada, the Buddha is quoted as saying, “hatred can never put an end to hatred; love alone can. This is an unalterable law.” That sure sounds a lot like “Do not judge” and “love your enemies” to me. In other words: the spiritual mandate here is bigger than any one teacher or tradition. This is not only an unalterable law, it is a universal one.
Finally, it’s important to consider that the restoration of love, empathy, compassion, kindness, understanding, and just plain old caring must begin with ordinary, everyday folks like you and me. We can’t wait for our politicians or media celebrities or religious leaders to set the tone here. The renewal of a society of kindness cannot be a top-down process. We have to begin at the ground level, with boots on the ground: it’s up to you and me. Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, when describing why his band became active in efforts to save the Rain Forest, said, “Somebody needs to do something —it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.” I believe he was being a bit tongue in cheek there, but beneath the wry humor is a solid principle. Somebody does, indeed, need to do something, and we who notice this are the ones being called. It’s not pathetic, but it is humble: to recognize that we have a vocation to be leaders in the revolution of love. There’s an old political slogan: “if the people lead, the leaders will eventually follow.” This must be our guiding light.
Author’s note: this essay is the result of a conversation I had with a Patreon member earlier this month; she was lamenting that our society seems to have lost its way in terms of basic spiritual values like love, empathy, and compassion. I couldn’t agree more, and this is what I came up with in response to that conversation. This was originally published on Patreon, which is a membership site so most content published there is behind a paywall; but I want to share this widely so I’ve made this post available to everyone. Please share it widely — all I ask is that you attribute this to me (Carl McColman) as the author and include this URL when sharing this article: https://www.patreon.com/posts/can-love-be-121730788
Thank you.
