In his book The Second Mountain, David Brooks writes about what is required to keep a commitment to love–whether it’s love committed to a spouse, to a career, or to God (56):
“Thus, the most complete definition of a commitment is this: falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.”
There’s falling in love. And then there’s staying love. Let’s not take either one for granted.
Some of us have yet to fall in love.
Gary Moon, in Falling for God, writes about the way some of us keep God and Christ at a distance (4):
“Most marriages to Christ never get consummated. Most never experience the joy of union … We settle for brief encounters instead of intimate dialogue and become content with the contract instead of enjoying communion. Or perhaps the notion of viewing God in a romantic way frightens us, as does the possibility of losing the boundary of our self in the ocean of his love.”
A first step for many of us is to fall in love with God. Consummate the marriage. We have to turn from self-serving reward-centered paradigms of spirituality and embrace, literally, self-giving relationship-centered paradigms of spirituality. We must learn to settle for nothing less than fiery romance with the One who has passionately pursued us our whole lives. We need to overcome our fears of falling for God and allow ourselves to plunge head over heels for him, believing wholeheartedly that he has already done the same with us.
And then we must stay in love.
Staying in love requires effort and intentionality. It demands, as Brooks reveals, building structures for those moments when love falters. The classic Christian phrase for this is spiritual disciplines. Serving. Protesting. Praying. Reading. And hundreds of other private and public acts, personal and corporate acts. These are not ends in themselves. They are the means by which we nurture and protect love.
A friend of mine was struggling to stay engaged in the spiritual disciplines he had chosen. Each time we talked he shared how difficult it was to pray or read or serve. But then he had an epiphany. “I started seeing each of these practices as a way of growing in love,” he said. And now he finds abundant energy and motivation for these practices.
Are you falling in love?
Are you staying in love?
These are two of the most important questions to ask each day.
