Today, someone who went to church (and depending on which church) may have heard the following readings from scripture:

Leviticus, Chapter 19, verse 4: “Do not turn to idols or make cast images for yourselves: I am the Lord your God.” In another way: You must love God above all other things.

Leviticus, Chapter 19, verse 18: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”

Matthew, Chapter 22, verses 37-39: “And he said to him (the lawyer sent to test him) ‘You shall love the Lord you God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

The kind of love these Biblical passages talk about is not any kind of watered-down love. It’s not the kind of love the search for which is “no more than vanity.”

To love an unseen God with all of your heart, soul and mind; this is a love that is not easy to conceive, let alone maintain, and might well overwhelm a poor human vessel, who, in showing such love, could easily be considered insane by the standards of an earthly society.

And to love one’s neighbor as oneself; that duplicitous, faithless and treacherous neighbor on whom there is no depending, because you know his heart is as weak and desperate as the one which beats within your own breast - this is a kind of love that stretches human capacity to its limit, and, even if practiced, might make you seem more fit for psychological study than admiration, in this flawed world in which we live.

The Bible, then, talks about this difficult kind of love. A pure, hoping, believing kind of love. Love that’s overwhelming in its potential and overwhelming in its strength. Love that is of God and not of this world. Love that can challenge the equilibrium of a fallen creation, and can fill a poor human being with a longing for a Lord who might seem forever out of reach. It’s a kind of love that can save you, and maybe in some sense make you a little crazy. A love that can cure all your ills, and maybe in another sense make you feel sick.

Here, for a little while, is an mp3 sample of Dylan, from March 16th, 2000, in Santa Cruz, California … performing Love Sick.

(See also Ronnie Keohane’s Time Out Of Mind With New Eyes)

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