While you read this column, I want you to imagine Dionne Warwick singing in the background,
What the world needs now is love, sweet love,
It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.
What the world needs now is love, sweet love,
No, not just for some but for everyone.
Do you think that sentiment is naïve or do you agree we need love more than an improved economy, clean energy, voting reform, a cure for cancer …?
We celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday. In a 1958 article titled, “An Experiment in Love,” he wrote, “From the beginning, a basic philosophy guided the movement. In the first days of the protest … the phrase most often heard was “Christian Love.”
King explained that this guiding philosophy later became better known as nonviolent resistance: “Christ furnished the spirit and motivation, while Gandhi furnished the method.”
I have to wonder why King’s model, which inspired so many of us to action in the 1960s, is no longer followed as the guiding star for social and political action.
What I hear more often is “I will fight,” framing our action as a battle and our opponents as the enemy.
I once asked a friend if he thought Mr. [Fred] Rogers would make a good President of the United States, and he quickly replied, “They’d crucify him,” alluding to another lover of souls who long ago was crucified — literally.
Is that why “Christian love” has gone out of favor? Is it because it doesn’t work?
Mr. Rogers was speaking to children when he sang, “I have always wanted to have a neighbor just like you. … Would you be mine? Could you be mine? Won’t you be my neighbor?”
What I hear more often today is “Not in my backyard” (NIMBY) and “I’m all for DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) in the abstract.
There’s the joke about a pastor who gave a glowing description of children on Sunday, but on Monday when he was having a cement driveway poured and children were writing things in the wet cement, he came roaring out of the parsonage cussing and swearing.
When a parishioner walked by, he said, “I love children in the abstract but I can’t stand them in the concrete!”
“Mr. Rogers’ kind of love is a fine fantasy for children,” we might protest, “but in real life, it doesn’t work that way.”
But then, I wonder, how many of us are in therapy as adults because, as the song reminds us, love is the one thing we didn’t get enough of as children?
Dr. King wasn’t a medical doctor. He earned his PhD in systematic theology and, in the piece mentioned at the top of this column, he pointed out that in biblical Greek there are three words, all of which are translated into English as “love.”
Eros as in physical love.
Philia or brotherly love.
Agape which according to King means “understanding, redeeming good will for all.”
“In speaking of agape,” he wrote, “we are not referring to some sentimental affectionate emotion. … Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people, or any qualities people possess. It begins by loving others for their sakes. Agape makes no distinction between friends and enemy.”
Former President Barack Obama gave a speech right after his party lost the election and urged his fellow party members to let go of what he referred to as ideological purity. He used the word pluralism instead of the word love, but to me he was responding to the charge that the kind of love Mr. Rogers was promoting needed to be replaced with a more “grown up” version.
“Pluralism,” he clarified, “is not about holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya.’ It is not about abandoning your convictions and folding when things get tough. It is about recognizing that in a democracy, power comes from forging alliances, and building coalitions, and making room in those coalitions not only for the woke but also for the waking.”
“[It’s] being open to the fact that even the folks we disagree with most might have something that surprises us. … We have to be open to other people’s experiences … listening to these people and building relationships and understanding what their fears are.”
Here are some suggestions to read to understand rural folks:
Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right; Arlie Russell Hochschild, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right; Sarah Smarsh, Heartland A Memoir of Working Hard an Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth; Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America; Wendell Berry, Jaybar Crow; Wendell Berry, The Memory of Old Jack; Wendell Berry, What Are People For