Earlier in this service, we read the two great commandments, and the second one is to love our neighbor as ourselves. That aligns with the Golden Rule, which commands us to treat our neighbors as we would like to be treated.
That is a message worth hearing over and over. Even outside of church settings, there is widespread recognition that love is what it’s all about. The Beatles sang “All you need is love.” The poets say “Love conquers all.” So: what is left to say that the poets and songwriters haven’t already said?
Well, one thing Swedenborg adds to the equation is that love must be couched in wisdom. Throughout all of Swedenborg’s works, perhaps the most recurrent theme of all is that there are two fundamental facets of life: love and wisdom, or to put it another way, good and truth. And that they must be united to each other. One without the other is useless.
From my youth, I wondered: what is does that look like – love without wisdom, or wisdom without love? It is easier for me to recognize what intelligence without love looks like, especially because I have worked in academia for most of my life. There have been many times when my colleagues seemed to be in pursuit of truth without good or love. Even the phrase “purely academic” implies “doesn’t do any good; just figuring things out for the sake of figuring things out” (or advancing an academic career). You go to an academic talk, and say, “Huh, that was interesting” and then move on with your life.
What does love without wisdom look like? Is that really so bad? Why does love have to be wrapped up in wisdom? Why can’t it just be on its own? So part of my search for understanding was focused on that question.
And then I became aware of dog training shows. There have been a number of TV shows about training dogs, and the first one I saw was with an English woman named Barbara Woodhouse. She would say, “I can train any dog in five minutes; it’s training the owner that takes longer.” More recently, another English woman, Victoria Stilwell, had a show called “It’s Me or the Dog,” and the lesson from both shows was the same: people don’t know how to love their dogs. Many owners would absolutely dote on their dog – coddle them, carry them around, feed them rich human food, let them sleep anywhere, never discipline them. And Stillwell would shake her head and say, “That is a miserably unhappy dog.” She would do an intervention, and show the owner that those attempts to be loving toward the dog were all wrong. She had rules such as, “Never let a dog sleep in a human’s bed.” Just like Barbara Woodhouse, the biggest problem was getting false ideas out of the human’s head. But she would also prove, by the end of every episode, that discipline and hierarchy and structure make dogs happy, not spoiling them. In other words, treating a dog like a human doesn’t work. It is not wisdom, and without wisdom, no matter how loving you are to a dog, you cannot make that dog happy.
In other words, when it comes to dogs, the Golden Rule has some problems: perhaps it should be revised to, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you – unless they are a different species than you, in which case you should treat them differently than you would treat yourself.” This led sociologist Milton Bennett (1979) to suggest a ‘Platinum Rule’: “Do unto others as they themselves would want done to them” (or “Treat others as they want to be treated”). What this acknowledges is that everyone is different, so imposing your own desires on someone else presumes we’re all the same, and all want to be treated the same.
Think of a 5-year-old boy who is told that Mother’s Day is approaching, and that it would be good to get a gift for his mother. The boy thinks, “I know the perfect gift! Mom will love it!” What’s his idea of a perfect gift for his mother? A baseball mitt. It’s what would make him happy, so he assumes it will make her happy too. That’s an error that most children make, but then we grow up and become adults, and adults don’t make that error anymore, do they? Husbands don’t assume that the way to make his wife happy is the same as what will make him happy. Well…
The great thing about marriage is that you have time to sort out this kind of misunderstanding. After a wife buys her husband flowers and a nice card for an anniversary present, he can explain that he would rather go fishing with her, and that will clear it all up. End of problem. Except that she is still likely to think, “I don’t think a day fishing is a very good way to spend an anniversary.” She falls back on her instincts, and those instincts tell her, “What would make me feel loved will make my husband feel loved too.”
Or worse, she reads a book about gender differences, and it says “All men like X” and “All women like Y.” But they are always oversimplified: some men love getting flowers and cards, some women love going fishing. Some mothers may even want a baseball mitt.
When our children were little, I worked in an office with all female co-workers, so when birthdays and anniversaries came around, I had plenty of women around who could give me suggestions for what to do for my wife. And they all said the same thing: “If you really want to give your wife a treat for her birthday, take the kids out of the house, and leave her alone to soak in a bath and have a day to herself.” But that was a hard one, because it clashes with my instincts. They were right, though – and it also worked in reverse. As a teacher, the hardest part of the semester was exam week, when I had a lot of grading to do but missed seeing the students. My dear wife would see my stress and say, “I’ll take the kids out of your hair for the day so you can grade.” And that would make the loneliness worse.
My friend Diane told me a story about her birthday. She isn’t married, but she has a sister who is her primary family. Diane had a plan for a perfect day: she was going to sleep in late, which was a rare treat, have breakfast at her favorite restaurant, go to a special exhibit at a museum she wanted to see, and read a favorite book. But her sister said, “That means you’ll spend your birthday alone! That’s terrible: I’m going to spend the day with you.” But her sister had no car, and she had a son in school, and that day her son got in trouble at school and the sister had to go to the principal’s office to deal with it. So Diane had to get up early, drive twenty miles in a snowstorm, and spend the morning in a principal’s office. She never got that breakfast, she missed the museum exhibit, and didn’t get to read that book – all her birthday goals were frustrated. And it’s all because her sister couldn’t fathom the idea that she actually wanted to be alone on her birthday.
The point is: people love each other, but it takes wisdom to figure out how to express that love, and there are certain mistakes we tend to make. Because of those mistakes, we often feel unloved when the reality is the opposite. A wife may lie in the dark and think, “My husband doesn’t love me because he doesn’t buy me gifts.” Meanwhile, he is lying right next to her, thinking, “My wife doesn’t love me because she doesn’t take the time to listen to me.” The reality is that both of them do love each other very much, but they are lacking in the wisdom it takes to figure out how to express that love – or read the other person’s expressions of love.
And this brings us to Gary Chapman, who is a pastor in a Baptist church in North Carolina. But he is more well known as the author of the book “The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment To Your Mate” (and several followup books). The five love languages he discusses are:
Words of affirmation (saying “I love you,” paying compliments, etc.)
Quality time
Gifts
Acts of service
Physical touch
He has a website where you can figure out not only what your primary love language is, but also the love language of family members and other loved ones – and the odds are, it’s a different language than your own. My father-in-law Ralph doesn’t say “I love you” to me or touch me – but whenever he comes over, he asks how my lawn mower is working, and brings me National Geographic magazines and jigsaw puzzles because he knows I like them. Thanks, Ralph: I love you too. My cousin Robert is married to a masseuse, who loves to express love to people through her hands – but Robert doesn’t like massages, so she has to figure out other ways to show him her love.
If they truly understand those differences, they can get to a place of feeling loved. But it may take a long time, because of those instincts. Just like that 5-year-old boy, whose mother gently told him “I would rather get face cream than a baseball mitt,” and the boy thinks, “Yuck, that face stuff is gross.” He has to take it on faith that when she says that makes her feel loved, she means it.
It’s a very important concept, and I’m so glad Rev. Chapman’s book has become so popular. But I do have one issue with it: he says definitively that there are five love languages and that’s it. Why just five? And by the way, the thing that makes me feel loved isn’t on Chapman’s list at all. What makes me feel most loved is what you are doing for me right now: listening.
Then I learned about an older book, from 1976, (“Beginnings in Relational Communication”) by Villard and Whipple. They have the same idea as Chapman, but use a different metaphor: they call it “relational currencies.” A currency is a way of conveying something of value to someone else – so if someone does a job for you, you pay them money to say “That work was valuable to me.” But there are many forms of currency, and not all of them have value to everyone. When I lived in Canada in my teenage years, I got tired of hearing Americans saying “Your money looks like Monopoly money.” Now we have Bitcoin and similar e-currencies that don’t involve the government; but there’s also subway tokens and barter systems. And I like that idea, because it emphasizes that for some people, one form of currency is very valuable, but for another person that currency is worthless “Monopoly money.” For some people, flowers are a great way to express love – for other people, that’s just wasteful and meaningless.
The other difference is that Villard and Whipple have 14 currencies on their list: they do include listening, as well as food, and something called “access rights,” which means giving someone access to a prized possession. In the movie Rain Man, the Tom Cruise character is very hurt that his father wouldn’t let him drive his antique car, but even more hurt when he finds out that his father let his autistic brother drive it. But even Villard & Whipple leave off many forms of expressing love that I’ve seen in my life. In the Rose family, humor has always been an essential way to express love: we always want to give each other the gift of laughter. There is sacrifice: giving up something for the sake of others. It’s curious that a Christian minister like Gary Chapman would have missed that one, since many Christian faiths look at Jesus sacrificing his life as the ultimate expression of love toward the human race.
So: why stop at fourteen? Or twenty? Or thirty? If they are “love languages,” isn’t it good to have a large vocabulary?
And then I ran across my favorite online discussion of all time. Someone started a discussion by telling the story of his mother, who never said the words “I love you” to her son, but she took a 3-hour train ride to bring him a vacuum cleaner. People followed up with hundreds of stories about family members who didn’t hug or say “I love you” but they changed the oil in their children’s car without telling them, or made sure they wore a seatbelt, or made special food. One had a mother who drove him to punk rock concerts and slept in the car during the concert. One girl wrote about her father, a big burly man who came to all of her Girl Scout events with her, and he was always the only dad there. Another girl said her dad bought her guns all the time, even though she didn’t like guns. And then there was a chilling one from a woman who talked about a gruff grandmother who never said, “I love you” out loud, but she added, “On the other hand, I have my husband telling me he loves me all the time, but his actions speak otherwise.”
Reading that long discussion, the pattern is clear: people felt unloved until they understood that there are different ways to express love, and caught on that their currency or love language didn’t match someone else’s. But it takes time to achieve that wisdom. And it takes even more wisdom to know that in order to convey that love to someone else, you must speak their language, not your own.
Imagine it from God’s perspective. God knows that in order for you to achieve eternal happiness, you must go through hardship and tests. Because you are not born perfect, you must be shown your shortcomings. So allowing you to go through those difficult experiences is an act of love. From God’s perspective, even a tragic death is not tragic if it leads to an eternal life in heaven. So we may look at God and say, “You don’t love me, because you didn’t do the things that feel like love to me.” If you feel that way, may you some day gain the wisdom to see that His love is flowing into you every single moment of your life.
