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Hello! Happy Easter everyone! It’s my first post in a while but only partly because it’s Easter – there were some great words spoken in my church service this morning and it persuaded me to post something I’ve been thinking of for a while.
My daily journey to work takes about 30 minutes and I try to spend most of this time praying and maybe catch a little bit of news. I say ‘I try’ in the broadest sense of the term. The fact is that I’m not really a lover of routine and will find my mind being tugged in a million directions, so instead of getting hung-up on staying on track with what I’m wittering to God about, I tend to ask God into the complex, convoluted chain of thought that overwhelms me daily. So when I was praying for some of my family recently and began thinking about how they’re atheists and then began wondering what it’s like to be an atheist, I didn’t worry too much.
What really interested me is how an atheist might think of love.
I realise that lots of the people I’m with everyday see humanity as an evolutionary occurrence – a movement in the symphony of nature, rather the an intentional, crafted, crescendo that my faith speaks of – and I’m fine with that. I just don’t get the depth of that, because if we are simply machines to make proteins – cases of hormones that can move ourselves around and use tools for the sole reason that this will enable us to stay alive long enough to make more of us to make more proteins – if this is what we are, then what is love?
Love is nothing. Love is a hormonal gush. A dilated pupil, an intricate mesh of non-verbal messages. A detected genetic resonance resulting in an unconscious agreement that any off-spring might be viable.
All these things are a description of the biological processes around the beginnings of love, but I just can’t believe that these things are all love is. I understand the social psychology behind the scientific understanding of love – and this stuff is sufficient for its purpose. But I can’t believe that there is nothing more than this. There is more than The Lady and The Tramp eating spaghetti and meatballs together, eyes meeting, a blush, the recognition that feelings are mutual…
I guess it concerns me that, if there is no spiritual existence behind these superficial rushes, then the transitory nature of modern relationships makes absolute sense. Heartbreak, loss, loneliness, STIs, the guilty feeling as you hold your partner’s hand and your eyes connect with your potential next partner, unwanted babies: these are all the necessary side effects of our need to have as much sex as possible while we stay alive.
I have to believe that love is more than psychology and biology conspiring to help me procreate. My wife means more to me than my sons and sex. I believe love is one of those glimpses of something deeper than the visible. Like God opening the windows on Heaven, allowing us to catch the slight scent of how things should be. I want to believe that love is worth working hard for, it is worth the effort of staying silent, getting home early, looking the other way.
I know that most people I know, whatever their beliefs, would say that love is more than those instincts. I just don’t understand how it could be more than the sum of these hormonal parts unless there is something deeper, something more, something other running underneath it.
I should make a confession here. As I told a work colleague earlier this year, in my depression, I have come to the conclusion that this assessment of love is also true of life in general. I’m not particularly low at the moment, not particularly depressed, but still the nagging feeling follows me that, if it were not for my belief in ’something more’, I could not see any worth in life.
If I am just one of billions of piles of protein, bouncing around the planet, waiting to see if my progeny are fit enough to make my DNA survive, then that is simply not enough for me. Why bother? If there is nothing more then I want no more of this. If there is no God who provides me with purpose, whose love enables me to love, who is stability and depth behind my hormonal fluctuations, then my depression makes absolute sense.
Without God, depression is logical.
Even further than that, I was reminded this morning that, if Jesus did not rise from the dead 2000-ish years ago, even my faith is worthless. It’s all another attempt to grasp at straws, to see if I can grab some meaning from some random, wise guy from a history book. It is only if Jesus didn’t just say some mysterious words and then die but actually came through the other side of death, back into life that there is any meaning at all in what I believe. It’s only in Jesus’ resurrection that anything is worth anything at all.
It is only in the resurrection that there is anything more behind love, community, relationships, justice, mercy and compassion than the desire to provide the infrastructure to propagate my genetic makeup.
So I guess this post is really here to admit that I’m needy. Part of the reason I believe what I believe is that if I didn’t, I would be forced to admit that nothing is really worth anything at all. I guess this is a selfish way to look at things, but thankfully, there is something more beneath my selfishness – I’m thankful that a relationship with the one who is called ‘love’ offers a reason for action far more readily than it offers self-satisfaction.
