on "falling"...prompted by The Bachelor

True confessions:  I watched the season finale of The Bachelor a week ago.  I know what you're thinking, pathetic right?  Blame it on a good friend who shall remain nameless (what's up Dre?!!) having me watch last seasons finale this summer. Well last seasons looser is this year's Bachelor and he's from my hometown. The rest is history.  So anyway, I watched it and went to bed disturb and frustrated. The next morning I woke and some thoughts on falling poured out. Maybe it's because I've never fallen.  I've loved.  But I've never fallen in love, as we say...at least I don't think so. I confess, I don't think I could even tell you what falling in love really means.

A good friend of mine spent a number of months in Sri Lanka and then travelled in India.  He met a young Indian couple in their early 20's who were on their honeymoon. He said that they were madly "in love."  The catch?  They'd met only a week ago after their families arranged their marriage.  I wonder how much their cultural tradition prepares them to choose love and how much ours prepares us for "when it's good for me love." Well anyway...here are some thoughts on falling from my journal the morning after the Bachelor. Bare in mind, my thoughts may be slightly unbalanced as they were a reaction...and reactions tend to be a bit more extreme than responses. While books have been written on love, I concede that this is only a small blurb sparked by a silly show, incomplete at best. I'll gladly receive correction for my inexperience.

Excerpt from 3.3.09

"I wake this morning considering the absurdity of love in this world--it's utter brokenness and the betrayal and deception that seems inherent in it. For in entrusting one's heart to another there is the unconscious belief that we will not be broken by the love--that it won't inflict pain, that the lover will not disappoint (and that love won't cost). There are few who would be so foolish as to speak this, but all feel this hope--this expectation and longing for perfect love. And I consider the absolute agony that we subject ourselves to by loving at all. And how can love be offered in one moment and in the next moment torn away? How could it be that love is pronounced with passion and then rescinded in numbness or anger all in the name of "following one's heart" (that is uncontrollable as to its wants)? We speak as if the will has no role in loving and that love itself is an idol to which we must bow--an idol who controls us as we bow in service to it. I doubt whether we "fall" into love at all. Maybe we fall into ecstasy, obsession, attraction, (desire) or fiery passion, but love?  I am not confident that love, by it's true definition, can be fallen into, though if someone can prove otherwise I will gladly stand corrected.

If I look for perfect love my eyes can look only to You, and when looking to You I cannot look merely at miracles and profound messages of truth. I cannot look to You and find only quiet walks on the seashore or revelations of light on the mountain top. For if in looking for love I find You, surely I find you supremely on the cross--bloodied for your Bride. And there, on the cross I find all my conceptions of love shattered in a grotesquely beautiful way, for You did not "fall" into the cross, You collided with it. Gethsemane's tears of blood are evidence enough of this collision between want and want. Surely You did not want the cross, but You did want your Bride. And so, in love You chose want over want-your Bride over feelings. And these feelings are rivaled by none of our flimsy and futile excuses (often carrying our same broken rhetoric) of "falling out." For surely if there was a time to use this escape clause it would have been now, when the literal weight of the world was on Your shoulders. Here, when love would cost You Your very self, surely You could have declared, "I've fallen out of love" and left your Bride on a broken altar of selfish sacrifice, burned to the core of her heart and left alone. Instead, You were left alone...because you loved. You did not fall into the cross. You chose it. You chose it in love, full of passion of a far deeper nature and a faithfulness incomprehensible. This was the Passion...and still is is our greatest light onto true passion.  You chose your Bride at infinite cost. IN LOVE You chose...and this was your fall--Your descent into the grave in love, that love itself might be redeemed--bought from its slave holders who manipulate it to be merely a shadowy and ethereal feeling absent of power or culpability. 

Does love constrain a person or does a person constrain love? Perhaps this is the question we've been asking all along. When love is love, defined by the cross alone, is not our answer simply "yes?" Love constrains us to love the beloved, but also we constrain love, receiving it from its Source and choosing its manifestation. Love is far more tangible than we have made it. Love acts. Surely love feels, but more than feels, it acts. As Kierkegaard would say: love has works. We choose to love against all odds and in the face of great pain we choose love. Lewis says that "the only place outside of heaven where one can be completely safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell." So we choose love. Let us be careful not to choose loves shadow, but love itself--not the copy, but the authentic. When faced with the pain of love, what a privilege we have to know in death Love Himself."

copyright 2009 Brianna R. Knuckey