Love’s Intuition

No one has to teach you. You already know how to do this. It’s natural. Intuitive. Automatic. And sometimes it gets out of control, revealing that things are more disordered in our lives than we would like to admit.

Leave it to comedians to point it out. They’re at least merciful in their critiques.  They make us laugh instead of simply despairing.  Well, maybe there’s still some despair in there too.  Jim Gaffigan is a master at walking the line of humor, critique, and despair.  He’s endearing because most of the laughs are at his own expense.  

Lampooning the extremism of exercise culture (it’s funny because Jim is out of shape), Gaffigan exposes the absurdity of all the mirrors that line our sweat factories.  Granted, it’s helpful to see if you’re doing an exercise correctly, but, if we’re honest, that accounts for less than 10% of total mirror usage.  The rest of the time we’re either glorying in self, hyper-critiquing self, or manically comparing self to other selves nearby (and wondering what they’re thinking about self).

Into this context, Gaffigan interjects a humor-drenched critique.  Assuming the voice and cadence of a “gym-bro,” he gets on a roll:

“If I’m going to work out, I want to look at something… like myself. I wanna look at myself while I work on myself. I should do a recording so I can listen to myself, while I look at myself, while I work on myself. As I leaf through my Self Magazine, read how myself can improve myself. Maybe I’ll go to my Facebook page and post photos of myself. Read what myself has written about myself. Yo soy muy importante.”

Hysterical and cutting, right?  Gaffigan calls out our rampant self-involvement and incessant pursuit of self-improvement.  And it stings.  But while we’re all guilty here to some degree, Gaffigan also illuminates something natural and good about us.  The thing no one has to teach you.  And that thing is to love and attend to yourself.

Self-Love

We automatically, instinctively care for ourselves.  We naturally avoid discomfort and expend great amounts of effort and energy to ensure that we have what we need and even want.  Think about it.  When it comes to food, sleep, attention, pleasure, help, healing, friendship, and more, we subconsciously pursue what we think we need.  Self-love is intuitive.  And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Where it goes wrong is in its relation to love for God and love for neighbor.  When self-love overtakes the rightful priority of other loves and saps the energy that ought to be devoted to them, the brightness of humanity fades.

I was a Christian school kid. So that meant we talked about the Bible and God-stuff every day.  Even in P.E.  My teacher had a mantra that we all were required to act out each day at the beginning of class.  It had to do with various loves and their priority.  We would start with both of our hands extended to the right and left and declare what we loved in descending order as we moved our hands and arms inward.  We would start with God, while our arms were fully extended.  And then move inwards to say “others.”  Next, we moved them closer and would say “self.” Then, “things and activities.”  And, finally, with gusto, we would smack our hands together and say “sin” (meaning sin was in no way to be loved).

While this was to me an innocuous and maybe even silly part of my childhood, it contains more profundity than I realized.  There indeed is a God-ordained priority for our loves.  St. Augustine wrestled this concept out of Scripture for us, summarizing,

“My weight is my love. By it I am carried wherever I am carried. By Thy gift [of the Spirit], we are enkindled and are carried upward.”^[1] 

We were made out of God’s eternal three-in-one love within Himself.  And we were made to share in that love, carried or ascending upwards – and then radiate it outwards to others.  But it is all intended to start with the love for God. The love that is inevitably drawn out of us when we catch a sight of His great love for us in Christ, believing in His truth and power.  However, this is not my present point.

Neighbor Love

The love of God ought to be, unsurprisingly, at the top of the love priority list.  But what’s next?  According to my P.E. teacher it ought to be others.  This sounds good, but is it correct?  Probably.  But a recent reading of Luke 10:25-37 gave me new insight into the priority of our loves and what loving our neighbor as ourselves entails.

In this passage, a law-expert questions Jesus about what must be done to inherit eternal life.  The scene feels reminiscent of Jesus’s interaction with the rich young ruler (Mark 10:17ff).  Jesus asks the law-expert how he reads it and he correctly answers by quoting Deuteronomy 6:5: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus affirms the man’s answer and tells him that he will live if he obeys this law.  

You would think the scene might end here, but then we get insight into the man’s heart.  We’re told that in “desiring to justify himself” he asks Jesus a further, impertinent question: who is my neighbor?  Answering, Jesus gives the famous Good Samaritan parable, which boxes the man into admitting that the Samaritan was the true example of neighbor love.

The parable is the vivid picture that animates the principle: “You shall love… your neighbor as yourself.”  How should we love others?  As we love ourselves.  And how well and naturally do we love ourselves? Devotedly. Automatically. Intuitively.

And this brings me to my point, to my new insight.  If we’re going to learn how to love our neighbor well, we must understand how we naturally love ourselves.  We have a built-in, God-given intuition to care for ourselves – our bodily and relational well-being.  We expend constant, consistent energy and effort towards this end.  It’s natural and subconscious (and often, in the case of workout mirror-watching, overly conscious).  

So, to love our neighbor means to love them on par with the same intuitive care and effort that we love and care for ourselves.  To grow in love means to steadily raise our intuitive awareness of the needs of others. It means to develop our reflex to meet their needs as we have the resources to do so.  And proximity matters (as we see in the Samaritan’s case).

Loves In Line

So, am I disagreeing with my P.E. teacher?  Sort of.  Should we love others more than ourselves?  I’m not sure that’s what the Scripture says.  But I do think we should love our neighbor in the same way, to the same degree, and with the same intuition that we love ourselves.  I agree with the Apostle Paul that we should “count others as more significant” than ourselves (Philippians 2:3).  But I also recognize the inevitable necessity of having to “put on your own oxygen mask first,” like flight attendants remind us.  

Furthermore, I recognize that our self-love is far from pure. Our sin nature has us looking more at ourselves in a mirror than gazing on God. We are beholden to vain trifles rather than beholding God’s transformative glory, which would reorder and redirect our loves.  This would give us peace, like puzzle pieces falling into place. 

However, all this to say, what I do see more clearly is love’s intuition.  And heart’s intuitive powers need a dramatic redirection. But with the Savior at the center, sin gets subdued.  And when the Lover becomes our Lord, loves reorder as rhythm meets rhyme.  Then we can translate what no one had to teach us into what the Teacher typified. 

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^[1] Confessions, Book XIII, 9.