These days people say they love everything and anything. “I love my new toothbrush!,” “I love my coffee maker,” “I love this brand of kim-chi,” “I love this ad on t.v.” When love gets objectified, it gets put into a box. When love is made literal, we become identified and attached to the things of the world. If love gets thingified, it is a love that must be managed, bargained for, negotiated…or worse, controlled. It is a love that deals in expectations and judgements.
What if love has no size, shape, or texture? Only when we realize that love can not be commodified or measured, that love is like a riddle that need not be deciphered, can we truly fall in love. And love necessitates falling. We don’t mean parachuting out of a plane or bungee cord jumping off a cliff, but dropping the possessive, smug, small-minded self. People believe you only fall in love as a youth when innocent of the cruel trade-offs of the world. But can we wake up in the morning and fall in love again and again everyday? For love is a kind of free fall. The fall in falling in love is an opening to faith. In love and faith, we are “struck” or “blinded” for this love is, inevitably, outside reason. To have faith is to embrace the inconceivable, and to fall in love is to abandon our old navigation device, our old bearings.
This love is hard to put into words and even harder to share. It is a love that has no want or partiality and desires no gain. When there is no object to love, we are filled with wonder and love the world for what it is—for all its beauty, horror, and neutrality. When love has no object, the naked heart experiences a totality that defies expectations. For love is like space. Without any one thing to hold it down, it moves forever, everywhere in all directions.
