The Perfection of Love

There are things that still rattle around in my mind years after hearing them. The most random things can take up residence and have an ongoing influence on the way I perceive life. Several years ago I heard a sermon by The Rev. Cn. Gregory Hinton, of St. Paul's Episcopal, Wellsboro on the occasion of a mid-week Lenten worship service. I can no longer remember the exact text, other than it was a psalm. But I do recall hearing one thing that has stuck with me. The core of his homily was that the opposite of faith is not disbelief, it is despair; to be without hope.

Recent national headlines announced the suicides of two college students, two in a single week. They were completely different situations, but equally tragic. What lies at the root of both is despair. Suicide is the raw product of despair; it is the fruit of hopelessness. However, there is another form of despair that is much more subtle and just as destructive.

One of the above situations included a young man who videotaped his unknowing dorm mate while he had a friend visiting. Shortly after a video of an intimate moment between two young men in the "privacy" of the dorm room was then distributed over the internet. The suicide of the victimized room mate followed shortly. The despair of the victim could not be more clear or understandable. The despair of the indiscreet voyeur not so.

What motivates a person to intentionally inflict pain and suffering on another? Fun? A degenerate sense of humor? Notoriety? Popularity? Insecurity? Meanness? Some of these things may apply, but it is despair that lies at the root of them all; a vacuum in which there is the absence of faithfulness in anything beyond one's self. Only despair openly entertains such aggressive acts against another. Despair suggests a world view without hope. A world view that begins at one's feet and ends at the far end of one's own shadow; self-satisfaction, self-centered, self-obsession, self-degradation, self-loathing, self-hating, self-destruction. Despair disallows empathy for another. It openly contradicts rational responses and actions. It leaves behind a trail of disaffected perpetrators and an avalanche of perplexed victims.

There is an antidote, a plunge into the antithesis of despair; its rival and archenemy: Faith. Faith in something bigger and authentically better then anything that we can capture, position or manipulate for our own short-sighted motives. There is no perfect definition for this bigger and better object of reverence and awe, other than, perhaps Love (with a capital L). The love (lower case l) we know in this earthly realm is filled with promise and joy, but is also hapless and unjust, often unqualified, and falls quite short of the bigger and authentically better Love. This Love does not get caught up in the slippery slopes of our lives; it remains constant and sure, presumes nothing, but expects much. Much care and concern for those who share our world, many acts of kindness for nothing more than the ongoing perpetuation of itself. It is not negated by acts of despair, but absorbs them like a dry sponge and expunges them. It is the only perfect thing we'll ever know in this life. Call Love what you wish; the God of believers; an undefined object of reverence for the Spiritually inclined; Hope for the disenchanted and disillusioned. But fall in love with Love and dispense with despair.