Early in our marriage, Liz and I had one of our first heated disagreements.  

I don’t remember anything about it, except that it was after dinner in our ground floor apartment in Brooklyn and sometime in the fall. 

Actually, I remember one more thing.  

It’s what I really remember about the disagreement: how it ended.  

I was winding down from my closing argument. 

(In case you were wondering, arguing with me can be a little bit like watching an old episode of “Matlock,” about which, you know, I realize not everybody likes “Matlock,” so rest assured: I’m not proud of it. But I get on a roll sort of like that. I speechify sort of like that. I try to bring on home sort of like that.)

Anyway, I concluded with my particular air of aggrieved principle.  

Liz was totally silent. 

I thought I had won.  

Instead, she smiled.  

Now I know that this is deadly. 

With Liz this is when you ought to try to run if you still can.  

However, I did not know that then.  

So, she smiled, looked me in the eye, and said, “I don’t know whom you’re actually having this argument with in your own mind, but it isn’t me.”

It took me about a nanosecond to realize that she was absolutely right.

It was an early lesson and remains an ongoing reminder that we can love and care for one another deeply, and yet still, the shadow of our own projections—and especially, of old scripts and prior formative experiences—can rise up without warning yet again to darken the space between us.  

The writer bell hooks, in her own book on love, observes, “the partner I left after many years first courted me with a love poem.  He had always been emotionally unavailable and not at all interested in love as either a topic for discussion or a daily life practice, but he was absolutely confident that he had something meaningful to say on the subject. I, on the other hand, thought all my grown up attempts to write love poems were mushy and pathetic.”^[1]

Who we are and who we’re not; who our beloved is and who they’re not; what love is and what it’s not; these things prove hard to work out. 

False confidence and easy sentimentality are never far away. 

This gets even harder if we decide we care, which of course, we should.  

Caring is holy work.  

James Keenan has argued that, when you get right down to it, mercy is our “willingness to enter into the chaos of another.”^[2]

I’d only add that part of what makes love so powerful is not only that, but surely also how it demands our willingness to wrestle with our own chaos. 

Love that seems only possible if and when the other person gets their act together is only a kind of half-love. 

It both receives and offers far less than it might, and finally, must.  

So where does this get us with Paul? 

Earlier this morning, I admitted that I can’t hear the middle part of 1 Corinthians Chapter 13 without thinking about and cringing at something I’ve said or done quite recently.  

I’m not saying that to toot my own horn.  

I’m acknowledging that Paul’s words offer a mirror. 

In my case, though, it may not be a mirror, but more like a scalpel.  

As you’ve heard, it begins by affirming that “love is patient and kind,” but then it quickly slices away the things that Paul makes clear love never is. 

It’s a move that seems designed to cut out any temptation we might have to fall for our own ready excuses and self-justifications. 

“Love envies no one,” Paul writes, “is never boastful, never conceited, never rude; love is never selfish, never quick to take offense.  Love keeps no record of wrongs, takes no pleasure in the sins of others, but delights in the truth.” (v. 4-6)

We might pick at his list.  

If we do, the self-justifications roar back quickly.  

For one thing, it doesn’t sound like anyone I know well, at all. 

Honestly, how possible could love like this be? 

Speaking only for myself, I can only offer others the love I have and the person I am. 

As for any or all of these things that he says I’m never supposed to be, well…hmm…. 

Love that is never touchy or scorekeeping or competitive isn’t necessarily what I’ve got to offer. 

There are days when the tired, grouchy, interrupting, sarcastic me who eats standing up in the kitchen is the only one I’ve got. 

However it is that we got here, that’s the reality my chaos.  

It’s why I need all the genuine love I can find to help me manage it.  

Yet we misunderstand Paul if we hear him saying that, if we can just manage to drum these tendencies out of ourselves, the part that remains will be nothing but unadulterated love – 99% pure, like a bar of Ivory soap. 

If only.  

He knows us too well for that.  

He knows himself too well for that. 

His view is that if God is in the managing, then we can begin to manage it, nevertheless.   

Love isn’t an impossible dream.  

His more immediate point is that to do so, to love as the world so desperately needs, requires constant effort. 

If you spend any time with his letters, you see right away that Paul always understood the love of God to be definitive and life-changing.  

Even so, his understanding of being saved was more nuanced than we often acknowledge.  

As he saw it, to be saved was hardly a one-and-done sort of moment, even for a man who had been blinded by the light of Christ on the road to Damascus.  

Paul knew that, each in our own way, we need new kinds of saving every day—new guidance, new intervention, new formation and re-formation. 

He believed that it was this ongoing work of God that was making him who he was, which was a work in progress at best.    

For Paul, if this is true of the love God has for us, how much more true it must be of the love between us. 

In that vein, his list of nos and nevers is not the call perfection of a hopeless idealist. 

It’s a summons, again, to enter one another’s chaos, seeing that chaos for what it is, and one another for who we are. 

It’s saying we are all works in progress, for which, thanks be to God.  

In the face of that chaos, it names love as a commitment to keep finding and saving each other as best we can.

And it’s saying, above all, that when we do even that much, it is of God. 

It’s nothing less than a glimpse of the life to come, when everything and everyone will be fully their true selves, finally redeemed, once and for all.  

Love “never tires of support, never loses faith, never exhausts hope, never gives up.”^[3] (v.7)

Because in love, our drama and chaos, our projections and evasions, our endless nevers and not yets are answered, at last, by the always of God.  

Amen.  

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^[1] bell hooks, All About Love, xxi. 

^[2] James Keenan, SJ, A History of Catholic Social Ethics, 22. 

^[3] The translation is from Anthony Thistleton, 1 Corinthians: A Shorter Exegetical & Pastoral Commentary, 217.