A Breach In The Wall

Love As The Great Positive Possibility

It’s easy to talk about love. Doing it seems a lot lot harder. As a generality, love sounds good (John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ is a good example), but in its specificity it’s another thing altogether. My roots are in Belfast. Along the Shankill Road Protestants and Catholics have a history of intolerance for one another—not so much love. There is a breach in the wall of civility and it’s an absence of kindness for the other.

Yet love still remains, as Barth mused, “the great positive possibility.” Although reading our news feeds makes it seem unlikely, it’s possible for humans to love each other. Perhaps the box office success of Oppenheimer suggests an eerie fascination with death which may yet be played out in the Russian/Ukrainian theatre.

Once again I turn to Barth who highlights two important thoughts on love:

1. “Love of the neighbour is love for him [or her] in his [her] strange, irritating, distinct createdness and constitution…”

2. “Love is the breath we breathe when, in the realm of evil, we have no breath left.”

(It is startling that in other religious traditions one’s last breath determines the direction of one’s sequential existence!)

We are invited then to keep loving the other even in the most disconcerting realities of their lives. We are invited to love authentically so that our last breath on Planet Earth is one of love and not of hate.