I am always perplexed by this thing called love. For instance, I've spent the better part of nine years trying to prove to other people that my love for my husband, Jeremy, is real. This was especially true in the beginning, because in those days most people questioned the validity of our love affair. At first I would try to tell people plainly and without pretense: I love Jeremy. But when saying these words, they always sounded empty and void, even disingenuous. The claim itself wasn't about love; the claim was really about me.
In his blog post, “Love Doesn't Exist,” the Irish philosopher, Peter Rollins, suggests that for something to exist it must stand out. He likens love to light, saying, “For love (…) is like light. When we are sitting with friends we do not think about the light that surrounds us but only of the friends that the light enables us to see. Likewise love illuminates others and so our attention is focused on what love illuminates rather than with the illumination itself.” In other words, love doesn't exist because it does not stand out, but rather, love illuminates others, always pointing away from itself, for we do not notice love in a room, but we notice that which love illuminates.
I think about Jeremy and some of our first few talks together, and then our letters, and then of the days we began dating. I can related to the idea of love being that which illuminates rather than being something that exists. Which would explain why I could never explain it. It wasn't Jeremy who illuminated love because love doesn't stand out. Love doesn't exist, and yet love has so affected me personally.
It was in a discussion group recently where a friend talked about the idea of proving the existence of God. People on both sides have tried, usually through science, to prove or disprove the existence of God, but have failed every time. God can't be proven either way, it seems. “But,” said my friend, “perhaps there might be a way to prove the existence of God through the existence of love, for it is written, God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. So whenever we see love exhibited, it is, in essence, the closest thing we get to evidence of God.”
Once he said this, I was immediately taken back to pondering the non-existence of love, how love doesn't exist but it effects us all, and yet it is scripture that tells us that God is love. So it would seem that God doesn't exist either.
I think about how many people I have known in my short life, people who've loved selflessly, who've taken soup to the bums behind Prairie Market on cold winter days, who've taken care of foster children and even adopted the ones they could, who've stood up for various causes in spite of adversity, who've loved their families without asking anything in return. People everywhere of every nation are showing the effects of something beyond themselves every time they choose to love--because God is love. Maybe, just maybe, it is this idea of God which casts our focus outward, illuminating everything around it, but never casting our focus on the illumination itself. Perhaps it's true, that God doesn't really exist, yet is the only thing that affects us all.
