I’ve been doing a lot of reading this week about love of all kinds. Yes, partially because we observed Valentine’s Day last week, and every news outlet loves a good Valentine story that makes readers say, “Awwwww.” But also because one of my favorite faith sites is currently publishing a daily series of devotions exploring divine love and our place in it.
I am fascinated by the intersection of faith-based, communal love and the romantic love celebrated in society. I find it a worthy discussion, because to me, based on all of the scripture and theology that I read, we’re all actually talking about the same need not to feel alone in this infinite universe. We’re just looking at it through varying lenses.
In a Washington Post story this week exploring the power of holding hands with a loved one, I read that a clinical psychologist at the University of Virginia has found that the “human brain expects access to relationships and interdependence because without them, the world’s problems are mammoth and we need to expend so much more psychological and psychological effort.” The phenomenon is called “social baseline theory.”
In other words, we’re wired to not want to be alone.
And that’s why last year the U.S. surgeon general said that loneliness in the United States has hit worrying levels because isolation can degrade one’s mental health and can be as dangerous to our physical health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Clearly, we need each other.
Those who ascribe to a faith, those who don’t, and all of the folks in between. We are one large, interwoven union, but counterintuitively as individuals we go about our daily lives in very small and isolated cells. And it’s literally and figuratively killing us all.
The Apostle Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 12:26-27: “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.”
And yet many of us continue to struggle by going it alone, never seeing the importance of caring for our neighbor. … And I do mean all of our neighbors.
The level of dissonance between what we know is vital and healthy for us as humans, and what we practice is shocking. While we know close relationships and ensuring that all of humanity is cared for leads to better health all around, we’d still rather stick with the outdated fears that somehow if my neighbor does better, I do worse. It’s just not true, and as faithful people we are confronted with this knowledge all throughout the scriptures.
Faith family, it’s time to actually embrace God’s call that we are all one people, connected through the divine love that has passed down through the ages since the earliest days of creation. Amen.
Devlyn Brooks is an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and serves Faith Lutheran Church in Wolverton, Minn. He blogs about faith at findingfaithin.com, and can be reached at [email protected].