Falling in Love

What’s the first thing you fell in love with? It probably wasn’t a person . . . Small children fall in love with a doll or favorite toy, a cuddle blanket, an imagined friend who can’t ever be left behind, a certain pair of sneakers, or even with Goldfish crackers. Sometimes it’s a healthier food such as blueberries or green beans, but those would be harder to take along to church on Sunday mornings, right? So bring on the Goldfish cravings . . .

Once we get a bit older, we develop our first “crush,” perhaps on a favorite teacher, on a classmate who’s nice to us, or on a TV show personality like Mr. Rogers, who just wants us to be his neighbor. And a bit later, we develop those serious cravings, like chocolate or Mom’s home-canned dill pickles. Later still, we may develop a strong love of another person that leads to lifelong commitment in marriage.

What we too often develop instead is a serious suspicion for other people who are different from us in some recognizable way. That might be skin color, style of hair or dress, professed belief systems or religious background, age, gender, ethnicity, education level, accent in speech, or even speech impediment. The list goes on and on.

Human beings have found many, many means to justify discrimination among groups, ways of separating ourselves from one another. And yet, just as Jesus showed us, love still creates bonds across those barriers. Feuding families like Shakespeare’s Capulets and Montagues have always had Romeos and Juliets who reached across the divide to one another. Even Jacob and Esau, twin brothers in the biblical Book of Genesis, who found horrific ways to set themselves apart from one another, reconciled and forgave one another.

The discriminatory setting apart of one group of human beings from another has to be taught to us, because our natural instincts are to love and care for each other. Ashley Montagu (no relation to Shakespeare’s characters as far as I know), a wellknown anthropologist/philosopher who often appeared on The Johnny Carson Tonight Show decades back, believed that humans can know best who we are by realizing how we come to earth, namely as totally helpless babies that cannot survive on their own, as many other animal babies can.

This implies that we must look after one another, even devote ourselves to caring for others. Humans being created to care for one another may seem pretty amazing, but we have an extraordinary tendency even to reach across species barriers to care for infant (or adult injured) animals of other species. Game wardens are often telling people who “rescue” abandoned fawns to “put that animal back where you found it,” because we feel compelled to help a helpless creature.

If only that instinct were transferrable to situations where people are divided over our usual manufactured hatreds: Russians v. Ukranians, ICE v. Minnesotans, Israel v. HAMAS. We might not be able to personally intervene to resolve those problems, but we can and should mind our own interactions and conversations, looking for ways to reach out beyond differences and support other humans in need.

When you encounter someone who is a stranger to you, do what Jesus would have done. Please extend love and kindness to them, not a cold shoulder. This Valentine’s Day, let love be expressed not only to those who are close to you, family and friends, but also to those who are “far away” or different. Welcome a stranger in church, greet another shopper whom you’ve never seen before at Walmart or HEB, smile and say hello to someone who walks into the waiting room at the doctor’s office. And for goodness sake, don’t assume everyone else’s primary goal is to hurt you. That sort of fear can imprison us in our own homes, and it’s ordinarily far from true.

Fall in love with humanity, dear friends. All humans share 99.9% of our DNA with others, and it’s silly to use that one part in 1,000 to set us apart, when we need each other so much.

Happy Valentine’s Day, dear readers. Extend love to all whom you encounter: it will come back to you tenfold, or even a hundredfold.