To Love; To Suffer

By Andrea Lingle

What do you want? For dinner, for Christmas, to learn? Where do you want to go? On vacation, in your career, with this story? Who do you want? To meet, to impress, to understand? To want, to desire, is as deep in the human story as eating, loving, and creating. What do you want? To eat of the fruit, for my sacrifice to find favor, to reach the heavens. To live is to desire, but it also is to suffer. It is the First Noble Truth of Buddhism. To live is to suffer. So, what of salvation? Shall we repress and reject and learn not to desire? Shall we choose a diet of dust?

When God rescued the Israelites from Egypt, God did so during a feast.

The first time Jesus stepped outside the mundane. What did he do? He endowed a celebration of desire with wine.

The bread was broken and fed five thousand, the bread was broken and became sacrament, the body was broken and became resurrection.

What is desire but the urge to live and grow and beget? What is grace but the urge to love and thrive and create? There a hand-in-handness between holy animation and desire. Grace flows like water, and it stirs the soul to celebrate! But if the nuptial wine had been stored up, hoarded, saved, it would have soured. Oxidized to vinegar, no longer fit for toasting new life: festering. Grace must flow or it turns to avarice. If Jesus came to bring salvation, salvation must be encoded in Jesus’s life and death, and what do we see Jesus doing? Seeing the invisible, touching the untouchable, defending the weak. These are the actions of love. To love someone is to see them even when they have lost themselves. To love someone is to be willing to inhabit what they cannot handle. To love someone is to stand with the bullied. What is salvation? To enter into the flow of grace, refusing to hoard it unto destruction, and, instead, to live open-handed in love.

But what is love but to suffer?

Love is a risky business. The moment that you are grasped by love, you are no longer your own. You belong to love. Your guts are now stitched to that which you have dared to love, and there are no promises that you will survive. Chances are, you will be eviscerated by this. Certainly, the Christ was. Salvation, it seems, cannot be counted on to bring us anything less costly or more painful than joy.