By John Cowan
Sentimentality, excessive and spurious emotion. It has always seemed to me that love is a response and to affirm the existence of love without an entity provoking that love is inventing some new thing not deserving of the word “love.” It is sentimentality.
That is not to say that some people with a reputation for love do not have grounds for that reputation. But I would lodge their readiness to love not in love itself but in consciousness. Their consciousness alerts them to people who need or deserve love.
Once upon a time, I was sitting in a restaurant with my mouth full and out of the corner of my eye I noticed the waitress working her way forward inquiring of diners as to their satisfaction. I thought, “How am I going to talk with a mouth full?” No need to worry. She skipped my table.
On her way back she asked me of my satisfaction. I responded that I was doing fine, and added that I saluted her sensitivity in noting that I had my mouth full and needed to be skipped. She thanked me for the compliment and added that she saluted me for noticing what she had done.
I say that she was a conscious person. You could respond that that was not what drove her but that she was a loving person and saw my need for a loving act. Well maybe. But am I wrong that a habitually loving person of all is unlikely to note the needs of a particular person? And in the final act is it not always the act of a particular person to a particular person that defines whether or not love has effectively occurred? Can you call it “love” if it is without a specific recipient? Or recipients?
I readily accept that you can call it love when a person mops the clinic floor aware of the needs of patients and staff and I will deny that title to the surgeon who delights in the craft but not in the patient. I agree with Seymour Glass, the character created by J.D. Salinger who tells a younger sibling about to go on stage to talk to the fat lady, not to the audience. The fat lady needs to hear you even if you cannot see her. You can love her. She is particular. Even if she is a conglomerate of all the fat ladies you have ever known .
Jesus’ famous parable of love is that of the Good Samaritan who loved a Jew enough to rescue him. But it is not a parable of love. It is a parable of consciousness. The listeners had their heads screwed on wrong. They understood that a Jew, particularly a priest or a Levite, would perform a loving act to another Jew, but a Samaritan was not a neighbor and therefore would not. Jesus question was, “So who is the neighbor?” not “Who loved him?” The answer to the who loved him offers no general message. It is a one time incident. Arbitrary and passing. But changing the definition of “neighbor” will last forever in the minds so changed. And will open to loving behavior. It destroys the stereotype and opens the possibility of loving what remains.
The founders of my present religious home , Quakerism, in the mid-seventeenth century did not focus on love but on changing consciousness. Sometimes they were downright mean about it. They thought that re-screwing heads would cause a change in behavior. It had for them! And they were open to threatening perdition if it would help. (Probably a bad strategy. But thankfully not their only one.) Their converts looked at the world differently, they saw God in everyone. And then they did love everyone, one person at a time.
Once there was a picture of a small boy, fully clothed, lying on a beach, drowned. Up until then I read about the troubles of refugees and, while generally sympathetic, I cannot say I felt loving compassion for them. One small boy lying on a beach changed me. Love, compassion, requires an object. Say to me refugees, and I see one small boy lying on a beach.