A friend of mine named Deborah Jones once invited me to address her A. M. E. church congregation on the various aspects and interpretations of Love. She asked that I include in my talk some reference to the manner in which the concept of Love had been interpreted in the African-American community and to tie this in with the Biblical or general spiritual understanding of it. Hmmm, Love: one the biggest and scariest four-letter words on the planet.

The moment Ms. Jones asked me to discuss this specific subject, the first thing I asked myself was why? It’s true. I had to ask, why talk about Love when every time someone picks up a magazine––such as PEOPLE or ESSENCE––the publication is telling you about some famous person who is in love with some other famous person? Why talk about Love when every time you turn on the radio you can hear a cowboy, teenage hip-hop heartthrob, or amazing superstar diva, enticing and breaking our hearts with sung tales of Love? Look at television or a movie, go the barber shop or go to the beauty salon, and one hears people whispering, giggling, talking––about what? Love?

Thinking about it further, I asked myself, why discuss that topic before a church congregation in particular? Certainly there was nothing I could say which had not already been said much better by the likes of, say, William Shakespeare, Aretha Franklin, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., or Toni Morrison. Then I remembered a story that my sister Vera had told me about watching a television interview with Luther Vandross. The interviewer asked Mr. Vandross an interesting question. He said, “Man, you’re always singing about Love. Why do you sing about Love so much?” Well here, I thought, was a very fair question. In an age of music that included the blue collar social awareness of Bruce Springsteen, the political activism of Stevie Wonder, and the revolutionary prophets of reggae inspired by the ancestral spirit of Bob Marley, why would one sing so exclusively about: Love. Completely undaunted by this question, Mr. Vandross responded, “I sing about Love as much as I do because it’s the one really important thing that we never get quite right.”  Wow: damn good answer. I understood then what could or would prompt a soul such as his to caution that, “Sometimes love is wonderful, but sometimes it’s only love.” Yet I could also see how his observation might prompt him to toss caution to the wind and declare, “Here and now, I promise to love faithfully.”*

It is so easy to look at the violence and sadness that has characterized life in the global village for the past century and acknowledge just how true Mr. Vandross’ statement was and is. Even when setting aside the disgraceful abhorrence of war around the world, consider that we hear far too much about grandchildren plotting against and physically attacking grandparents to deny the overwhelming truth of the above statement. We may prefer not to but we do in fact hear far too much about husbands brutalizing wives. We hear too much about so-called girlfriends stabbing or shooting so-called boyfriends in the heat of an argument over sexual infidelity, or squandered money, or who drank the last beer. Too much about children literally growing up wild in the streets the same way cats and dogs grow up wild in the streets. Need we mention guns in schools at all? And we hear too much about one neighbor trying to rob or kill another neighbor because the “other” is of a different race, religion, income bracket, sexual orientation, gender, or ethnic group.

Considering these different variables and Luther Vandross’ spiritually elegant response, I again asked myself why address a church congregation about the vagaries, potentials, pleasures, responsibilities, terrors, and illusions of this thing called Love? The answer became very clear: We need to talk about Love––because we don’t understand Love.

We keep getting it mixed up with other impulses and realities. We confuse it with trying to control the will, thoughts, and actions of another person. But control is not love. We get it mixed up with our anger over another person’s disagreement with us, or with our fear of being alone. But Love is neither unbridled anger nor debilitating fear. Perhaps far too often, we get it mixed up with lust, although it usually doesn’t take very long to learn there’s a very big difference between the two. Lust is like a match that will burn with impressive heat for maybe fifteen good seconds. Authentic Love, inspired by spiritual unity between two people and founded on a principle of respect for the integrity of individuality as well as intimacy, is more like an oil lamp. It might burn a little low sometimes but can be refueled and never goes out forever.

If most of us are getting it––Love––wrong, or mixed up with other things, then it’s possible we need to decide what Love truly is. Or we at least need to examine what it is and should be within the context of our own lives.

One of our greatest living poets is a woman named Nikki Giovanni. At the end of her poem, “Nikki Rosa,” the poet tells us: “Black love is black wealth.” That says to me that Love is, among other things, an important resource––a resource like gold, or land, or wisdom––a resource which no one can take away from us if we treat it with the proper sense of value and respect. Please think about that for a moment. “Black love is black wealth.” That means that anyone, really, who takes time to discover and honor what Luther Vandross sang of as “The Power of Love” can channel that divine force in many wondrous ways. It means not having to go to anybody’s job to work for it and not having to elect politicians to make it legal or declare it illegal. What it does mean is doing something as simple and corny and cliché-ish as looking with the vision of our spirits inside our hearts, then acknowledging it, claiming it, and sharing it with others. But a question still demands to be answered: exactly what is it that we would acknowledge, claim, and then share with others, and how would we go about achieving this apparently enigmatic task?

In the first Epistle of John (4:7-8) from the King James Bible, we read as follows: “Beloved, let us love one anther: for love is of God, and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.” And the Master Jesus gave us these words in the Gospel of John (13:34): “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.”

With this “new” commandment, we realize we have received the supreme example of what love can and should be. We need only to ask ourselves: what were the ways that Christ demonstrated Love, before that ultimate sacrifice of surrendering his physical being? What were the ways in which he lived Love? One of them was by teaching us to cultivate a sense of faith. Another was by exercising the greater principles of forgiveness, mercy, and compassion over the lesser inclinations to blindly judge, attack, and condemn. He lived Love by feeding and ministering to the suffering multitudes as opposed to fearing or ridiculing them. He demonstrated Love by counseling against hypocrisy. He did it by daring to accept the weighty mantle of spiritual leadership and by challenging that which he recognized as unjust or unholy in the lives of men and women. And He did it by stretching out his hand and spirit in the act of healing others. These are some of the ways in which Christ loved us all, and said we should love one another.  

In one of his profoundly eloquent speeches, “The Drum Major Instinct,”  Martin Luther King, Jr., said that upon his death we should forget the fact that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize along with 300 or 400 other awards. He said that was not important. What he asked us to remember about him was that he did try––he tried––to feed the hungry and clothe those who were naked while he was in this world. He did try to Love and serve humanity. In other words, he made his example, to the best of his ability, the same example that Christ provided us.

As I prepare to close, I would like to share a poem taken from my Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black manuscript and entitled, “The Drawing of the Two Dervishes”:

In the drawing of the “Two Dervishes,”

yours is the robe with gazelles

leaping beyond the snarls of lions,

like wisdom avoiding the excrement teeth of ignorance.

Then trapped by the jaws of the waiting dragon:

like faith, imprisoned, in a world made of lies.

Mine is the robe without color or images, waiting

for your sigh, so rich and heavy with love divine,

to breathe me full of knowledge and form.

Somewhere inside my emptiness time is just beginning.

And somewhere, inside my nowhere, time has already ended.

If you open that book sitting sacred in your hand

out comes an oasis filled with poem-singing birds,

lilac-scented palm trees and moon-dancing waters.

If I open the same book, the earth turns to stone

and every flying thing falls dead upon its face.

I want the existence-and-nonexistence of God to darken

my eyes the way it does yours.  Let my tongue dance

the slowdance eloquence of your words’ perfect silence.

Now, that poem may be understood in multiple ways but the main thing it means is this: by seeking and walking in Creator’s light, by seeking and walking with Creator’s grace, we learn the truest ways to live Love. We not only manage to survive, but we thrive and live as families, as neighbors, as friends, as true human beings. We learn to love one another as Christ––and truly as many women and men throughout history––dared to love us all.

*Song quotes from Vandross’ “Sometimes It’s Only Love” and “Here and Now” respectively.

Aberjhani

© 7/3/2005