"BUT DO YOU LOVE ME?"

Fiddler on the Roof was a highly successful 1964 Broadway production and in 1971 came out as a very popular award-winning musical-comedy drama film.  I thought it was a great film.  My title comes from a song in the play sung by Tevye, the Jewish milkman husband of Golde and the father of five girls who lived in a poor farming village of Ukraine at the beginning of the last century. 

Tevye sings this song as he considers his 25 year marriage to his arranged-marriage wife, and asks her the question, “Do you love me?”  As Jewish cultural traditions are being challenged and turned upside-down by events in society, his three oldest daughters are influenced and wish to marry for love, not having their marriages arranged by a matchmaker.  So too does the staunch traditionalist Tevye also begin to think about love as a legitimate reason for and component of marriage.

I have read and reread an excellent book by C. S. Lewis titled The Four Loves.  In it he treats affection (storge), friendship (philia), eros (the natural love of a man for a woman and vice versa), and Charity (divine love).  They are all of a piece and they all have a progression.  It has greatly helped me to understand the nature of love—how the three “natural loves,” affection, friendship, and eros or what we call ‘being in love’ can and ultimately must be subsumed and magnified if done right into the human version of Charity or Divine Love.  Our three “need loves,” as Lewis calls them, can be transformed into “gift love,” the kind of love God has for us; there is a higher love.

To develop it, there is an art to love.  There is also a law of love.  That is to say, there are attitudes, appreciations, expectations, and expressions or behaviors that show this most powerful of all human emotions in its finest light and which can ultimately refine a person to his or her highest potential.   But know, also, that love, or a deprivation of it, can bring any person to the greatest extremes of joy or down to the depths of despair.

How is it done?  As Jesus says, “As I have loved you, love one another.” It is done by looking outward and upward, not inward.  As we better understand the nature, requirements, cautions, duties, and rewards and conditions of love we can better live a life blessed by giving and receiving love—which, I submit, is more important to a rich and happy life than anything I can imagine.  But there is an order to it: a mature love gives first, and then finds, happily, that he receives.

Yes, Tevye’s marriage relationship with Golde has been functional and utilitarian—she has cared for him by cooking his meals, washing his clothes, keeping his house, and raising his children.  And he has faithfully provided for her and their children the necessities of life as well as protection and security.  But it has become prosaic. And he knows inside himself that he wishes and senses it could be more—her for him and him for her. Like all people, Tevye needs the reassurance and comfort that a happy acknowledgement brings. ‘Need love’ in humans never goes away—at least not until it is transformed.  In the meantime, it needs to be fed.

We know there is a geniality to love—a mutual gratification and happiness at being in each other’s presence that the sharing of common values provides. But it comes not by “seeking our own;” it comes by giving—“as I have loved you.” Love is the provision for the other the knowledge that they matter and that they are the provider (at least as far as another person can provide) for you as well.  Love goes both ways.

The question is not to our earthly love, “Do you love me?”, but “Do I love you?”—meaning, do I love God first--the way He loves?, and then, if I do, I will love you even more, and you will know of my love.

  

Indeed, we shall find, if we continue in faith and in hope that love for one another is our "work and our glory"—not just God’s.  And it will be enough, for Charity—Divine Love, "never faileth" to do its mighty work and to satisfy.