And so we come to the final week of Advent – the week where the focus is love. It seems appropriate that this week happens at the time where we are catapulted into the chaos of family and high stakes festivities. Where expectations and needs and understandings of reality clash and clang like swords in combat. Where love seems anything but simple.

Due to a dastardly case of covid, my family will be celebrating Christmas almost a week late this year. For the first time in my life I didn’t spend Christmas day with my parents. We didn’t do our Christmas traditions. And the pain and requirements and expectations and needs associated with that loss chucked up a whole new set of questions about what love looks like for me. In real life, love seems a lot messier than on Christmas cards.

I think I have been dreading the week where the focus is on love because, the older I get, the more I realise I don’t really do it as well as I thought. ‘Love’ is something we talk about constantly. We use the word (especially if we are a female millennial) almost incessantly. And there are many examples of ‘love’ in our world. What a mother holds for her child is certainly love. So is the feeling the child has towards her mother. And yet how many mothers are truly whole enough to love in ways that leave no scars? How many children have a love where they are not the centrifugal force about which their parents turn? And then there’s romantic love, which is surely the icing on the cake, and yet, once you start digging a bit deeper, I often wonder how many of us confuse ‘being in love’ with the feeling of being loved ourselves.

There is a phenomenon, that my husband likes to dryly remind me of, in which your confidence in your own authority on a topic decreases in inverse proportion to your actual expertise on the matter. It happens because the more you know, the more you realise there is to know. I think it’s a bit like that with love. I think, the more I learn about the human heart (and the more I learn about my heart, in particular), the more I see I need to learn. Although I was lucky enough to be brought up in a family where I was loved and have friends who loved me and marry a man who loves me faithfully, my heart has managed to become wounded and broken and separated from love in so many many ways. And sometimes, when I look at God, I feel no love at all.

God says they are ‘love’. I have to admit that I honestly do not know what this means. The concept of continuous and joyous self-emptying being the very nature of the godhead fascinates me – and is one that I find very difficult to grasp. If the very nature of God is self-emptying goodness, then why this mess? Why doesn’t she/he do what is screamingly self-evident to any human who looks upon the brokenness around us? Or is the answer truly in the holiday we are celebrating? How does a baby in a manger fix all of this?

It would be dishonest to say I haven’t felt a sense of God’s love at all, though. I have had moments of feeling it – like sunshine on my back. It’s not like something you see fully in front of you – more like a diamond that you can only see one face of at a time. I’ve felt moments of it – of unexpected affection or delight. Moments of release and exultation. I’ve felt peace and a sense of being front and centre of their gaze. And yet those moments seem to be the exception, not the rule. My heart quickly retreats into its self-imposed prison – of bitterness and lowered expectations, of unforgiveness and victimhood, of disappointment and self-protective grasping.

I think I’m more likely to have felt God’s love through people who seem to know them. These are the people who make me think that God must be alright and, if I could only know the Jesus they know, I would truly love him. I’ve experienced a lot of love through people these past two years. Love will sit and listen to my pain. Love will fast with me. Love will forgo eating carbs when he is around me. Love will hold my hand at every single appointment. Or pay for a hot air balloon ride for me. Love will offer to have my baby for me, even if she doesn’t yet know what that really entails. Love will walk in my front door and empty my dishwasher. Again. Love will say ‘it’s OK’ when I arrive late for a catch up. Again. Love will offer me their beach house. Love will go surfing with me, just to let me feel the joy of the waves. Love will come and mow my lawn and start digging out the dandelions. Love will pick up the phone. Again.

There has been a lot of commentary on the insufficiency of the English word for ‘love’ and the various types of love. I suspect that there are more than four or ten or twenty different types of love. Perhaps ‘love’ is more like the concept of ‘colour’ – and there are a hundred thousand different variations and intensities and flavours, but it saturates everything and everything is flavoured by the love soaking into it. Or maybe love is more like the light that bounces off the colours – revealing the true nature of the objects and textures in the world – the requirement for everything to be.

The more I learn about it, the more I realise my heart is dry and thirsty, and perhaps hasn’t given away as much of it as I think. Perhaps learning to love is like learning to speak, and we are all infants who are still babbling. Perhaps this is OK – the babbling stage being an important one as we slowly learn to use our vocal chords and eventually progress to using one or two words.