[“Abou Ben Adhem,” by Leigh Hunt]
I first encountered that poem when I was younger than Iain is now, I think, and it’s stayed with me ever since—not because it’s poetically great, but because it’s a fascinating scene. I could easily start analyzing it as I would an Old Testament narrative—if the angel was there, God must have sent the angel, and obviously God knew what would happen, so . . . —and I’d be off to the races. That would be piling far too much weight on it, of course, but the poem is making a theological point: we can only love other people because of the love of God, and so to the extent that we do love others, it’s a sign of the love of God at work in our hearts.
Which is true, and one of those truths which sounds very noble and high-minded, especially if one wants—as it seems Leigh Hunt, who wrote “Abou Ben Adhem,” did—to argue the position that all religions are fundamentally the same, all lead to God, etc. At first blush, it seems freeing; you don’t have to worry about anything specific the Bible teaches, or any other religion, because as long as you love other people, you’re good. But here’s the kicker: that’s a move away from a divinely-revealed faith toward human religion, and as I’ve noted recently, that means legalism. What does it mean to love other people, and how do we know if we’re doing it right, or if we’re doing it enough? All well and good if you have an angel show up in your bedroom to tell you, but what about the rest of us?
I get teased a little for my insistence that we have to define our terms—which makes me smile, because it makes me feel seen—but no word ever actually goes undefined; it’s just that if we don’t get the definitions out into the open at the beginning, we don’t know what definitions everyone is using or who’s determining them, and so we’re playing by someone else’s rules without knowing it. That’s especially true when we’re using a big, loaded word like “love.” “All you need is love” sounds great when you have John, Paul, and George on guitar with Ringo on the drums, but what happens when you get down to brass tacks?
Well, what happens is what always happens: the law of love yields to the love of law, and the people who get to decide what it means to be loving make all the rules and judge you for breaking them. Read more