The Gestalt of Love
As much as we want to compartmentalize love, it cannot be divided into parts. Before you kindly point out to me that for the last couple of weeks I’ve been doing that very thing, let me beat you to the punch. Yes, I admit it. I’ve talked about loving God at times as if it is a separate part of my life that has little to do with other parts. I do this because I find it virtually impossible to talk about the totality of love all at once.
A medical doctor can talk about different organs and their functions, but she always holds in her mind the truth that none of`the organs function alone; each needs the other to survive. In the same way, I may have been talking about different kinds of love and different aspects of love, but all the time I’ve tried to remember how they are interconnected and how one does not exist without the other.
We talk about love–love God, love neighbor, love self–as if each of these can somehow be partitioned off in our lives. The sad truth is that many of us live like this. That is, we mistakenly believe that we can love God and still be angry at our neighbor. We find nothing unusual or disjointed in this reality. I encounter people almost daily who would readily admit they love God. They attend worship regularly, and they may even read their Bible consistently. Yet I watch as these same people mistreat others, speak unkind words, or dismiss others as unimportant. In the same fashion, we may speak of how much we care for and love others, yet continually negate our own being.
When Jesus put the command to love God and love our neighbor as our self together (these two statements were not originally paired together in the Old Testament), he was not just saying we should do both. He was saying they go together in inseparable ways. John makes this ever more clear in his writing.
We love because he first loved us. Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. (1 John 4:19-20)
When I read such passages, I want to skip over them or try to rationalize them away because there are many times and many ways I do not love others. I don’t want to admit that those acts put me at odds with God. I don’t want to admit that my words of adoration to God are no better than lies and that I’m living a life of hypocrisy. In the same way, when I don’t love myself, yet profess to love God, I am a liar. I can’t have it both ways. Love doesn’t work like that.
Gestalt, according to my handy online encyclopedia, is “a collection of…entities that creates a unified concept…which is greater than the sum of its parts.” Love is a unified concept that cannot be disassembled into parts without destroying the totality and breadth of its reality. When we try to compartmentalize love in our lives we limit its true power. When we try to love God without loving our neighbor or ourselves, we will always fall short of true love. The reverse is true as well. If we attempt to love others, and even ourself, apart from a love for God, our attempts will always be only shadows of what they might be.
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