“Love You Like Crazy”

Paul Montague 29/08/2021

Readings - Song of Solomon 2:8-13, Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Good morning! I sat down for coffee with a wonderful friend this week. I’m a huge fan of this person. They were feeling a bit shaken. Their business has been going great guns, and is at the point of expanding again. That’s all good news, but COVID-19 was getting to them.  On one hand, they felt some guilt about their business growing during the pandemic while others have died. On the other, they worried that our good fortune in Western Australia can’t last forever. Surely, they thought, it’s only a matter of time before WA has a serious crisis like some other parts of Australia and the world, and wouldn’t it be irresponsible to employ more staff and lease a bigger premises while that threat hangs?

There was not a lot meaningful I could say in response to that uncertainty. I don’t have a crystal ball, and I’m glad I don’t carry the weight of employing folks right now.  Any kind of forward planning takes some courage, some optimism, and a big consideration of risk right now. Ultimately, people have to accept that we may get decisions wrong during this time of shifting ground, and we humans, unless we’re reckless gamblers, generally don’t like embracing a serious chance of getting it wrong.

I also got into an extended conversation this week with a person over COVID vaccination. Like many, I’m a zealous evangelist for vaccination. This other person, like a similarly vocal percentage of society, is a something of a doom-saying prophet against of the dangers of vaccination. I’m grateful we listened to each other, and didn’t get into a barney. Ultimately, I don’t know with certainty that COVID vaccinations aren’t unacceptably risky, and at some level I’m taking a punt based on belief.  As a scientist or a medical researcher, I’m barely a tourist. Sometimes you have to roll the dice, and trust that you’re listening to wisdom. Only time will prove one side right or wrong.

I couldn’t help but read today’s gospel passage from Mark through a lens of managing Covid-19. The pharisees, having a crack at Jesus’ disciples for not washing their hands before eating are not wrong, from a point of good hygiene. That’s the thing about so many of the ancient purity laws that Jewish folks were still expected to live by in the first century. They were pragmatic and sensible in origin. Wash your hands before you eat, and you’re less likely to get a nasty case of gastro and pass it around your community. Don’t eat shellfish, there’s too high a chance it will make you sick in an age before refrigeration. Stay away from pork if you live in an age before cool rooms. Store raw pig meat at ambient temperature, unlike raw mutton or beef, and you’ll never cook the campylobacter out of it. Best to leave it alone until the fridge is invented.

In the ancient world of course, bacteriology wasn’t a thing, so somewhat magical narratives were applied to what was known. People knew eating pork had a significant chance of making you sick until the point of death, so the story passed down was it made you sick because God didn’t want you to eat it. They knew washing your hands before eating was less likely to make you sick, so again, the communal wisdom was you wash your hands because God says you wash your hands. The pragmatic origin then gets lost over centuries of cultic and cultural narrative. Do the thing, and do it a very specific ritualised way, or more often don’t do the thing, because God insists, and the Pharisees were red hot for telling people what God insists on, without a ton of critical analysis applied.

Jesus, however, was a gun critical thinker, and he has a hot take on making hand hygiene a question of rightness before God that would have been beyond provocative in an age of purity codes. Nothing going into a person from the outside can defile them, he says. It’s rather what comes out from the inside of a person that defiles. For my two cents, this is one of the biggest mike drops in the gospels.

I think there’s always danger in readily imposing modern questions into the context of Jesus’ teaching, but if I imagine this in our present context of vaccination; I hear injections can’t sully your soul, but if you’re refusing them because what’s coming out of you is selfishness and an active disregard for the common good, then check yourself. In my questioning of attitudes towards vaccination in the light of this teaching, it’s still not black and white. A lot of folks refusing the vaccination seem to genuinely believe that the vaccines are a product of some evil global conspiracy, and so they’re ultimately motivated by their belief that they’re the ones advocating for the common good. No doubt they believe they’re the ones who are giving out protective love from the inside, whereas my gullibility is coming out from my inside to lead others into becoming microchip and nanobot infected walking mobile phone towers. Or something. I’m not clear on the details of the conspiracy.

See? There I go, smugly mocking and stereotyping the vaccination nay-sayers, like they’re all of one mind. In part, what comes out of me in this debate is my ego, and my desire to be right. Inside me is an all too human thought of “I’m clever, and those who disagree with me are stupid.” What’s coming from the inside out of me is partly competitiveness. I think in this case that competitiveness is mixed up with love and concern for others. Human thought and emotion are rarely pure. It comforts me to hear Jesus say it’s not what’s kept inside that defiles, because we all have a mix of healthy and unhealthy thoughts. It’s the inner thoughts becoming words and actions expressed out that compromise love, that defile love.

How do we check ourselves to measure if love is the base energy flowing out in our words and behaviour?  Maybe one way is to remind ourselves of how tangible and unquestionably powerful love feels when we’re in love. Like, head over heels, new blossoming romance, high on oxytocin, Mills and Boon bodice-ripping type love. That kind of love is so potent, so intoxicating, and overwhelming, that once we’ve felt it in our lives, we can never doubt the enthusiasm of it. Even when our experiences of crazy infatuated love are unrequited, or end in relationship breakdown, or go stale with the passing of time, or end with the sadness of the passing of a soulmate, that memory of a feeling so potent, going beyond the emotional to the fully embodied, is something we shouldn’t forget.

That’s where the Song of Songs, that strange and somewhat embarrassing book in the Hebrew scriptures, can help us to be reminded. The Song of Songs, a series of poems, or dramatic dialogues more accurately, is pure make-your-mother-blush eroticism. It’s all heavy breathing and burning desire and fixation on the alluring anatomy of a beloved. It makes me think of a Carry-On film in its unashamed desire, except there’s no jokes or Oo-er, Vicar! winks to the camera, its’s all entirely sincere and earnest. Erotic love, unadulterated romantic focus, is a force, and there’s nothing quite like it. Christian tradition will try and con you, and tell you this book is all terribly pious and holy and really only about the powerful love between God and God’s people. That’s a big no from me. This book is exactly what it seems: Celebrating a human experience so profound and transformative it could only belong among books about divine experience.

Chances are you hear the phrase erotic love, and you associate it only with sexual love, because that’s what it’s come to mean in modern English. That’s a huge misinterpretation of what the word eros meant in the time of Jesus. Eros is love uniquely focused on someone or something to a degree of powerful singularity. Take a moment now to think of a most favourite other that you quietly love in a way that’s unique and powerful. Maybe it is someone you’ve known in a physically intimate away, or maybe it’s your best friend, or your grandchild, or your favourite sibling, or your cat; just someone who lights you up with love when you see them. That powerful feeling, of wow, I love them so much, that’s the love that we need the blushingly racy romantic poetry of the Song of Songs to remind us of.

Some remarkable souls get to a place of passionate, crazy, driven love for all humanity and all creation. Some fall in love with everything around them, and have a mystical, divine relationship, a holy romance, with life itself. St. Francis is one that comes to mind for me. I can think of musicians, poets, artists, mystics, activists, philanthropists. I can think of Jesus of Nazareth. What came from inside and poured out of Jesus was passion. It was as a passion at least as potent as the passion of a teenager in lust, and it transformed and inspired others. I hope it continues to transform and inspire us.

That reminds me. I love you very much, so please, please get vaccinated. Amen.