The Lover

“We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.”
-Thomas Merton

Who the Lover Is
The Lover, he is the character that most men do not know what to do with, yet he won’t go away. He is seen as a weak, needy personality. He is perceived to be evil in many Christian circles because he is tied to passion, and “passion leads to sin” is a perception held on to by many churches. Still the presence of the Lover will not be ignored, bottled, or set aside.

Conservative religion condemns him. This condemnation sends the Lover underground into hiding. You don’t talk about him, you don’t acknowledge his existence. You bottle him up and try not to disturb him too much lest he explode and get you into trouble. The problem conservatives have with this personality is that they tie the Lover merely to sex, and think that there is nothing more found within this role. His personality will not be simplified like this though. It is larger, and more rounded than that.

Liberal religion does not restrain him. They make the mistake, not of bottling, but of spilling. “Don’t bottle the lover,” they say, “let it run freely.” If you dump your bottle of coke on the ground, you still don’t get to enjoy the drink, just like those who never open it, and keep it bottled. There has to be a common ground to stand on and have a healthy expression of this character.

You cannot bottle up this character. Passion always bursts from its prison, yet you cannot spill the precious water on the ground. Passion must be contained in a proper vessel, and given the proper outlets, or it resents you and rears its ugly head in unhealthy ways.

What does the Lover look like? What are his personality traits? The Lover is the one who appreciates and enjoys beauty, creativity, and love. The Lover is the poet, artist, or musician in all of us. The Lover is the one who is compassionate, merciful, and pitiful of other people. He is the one who extends grace, who is strong enough to not take revenge, who is patient with those who irritate him.

The lover enjoys beauty, creativity, and love. He is the one who can sit in the woods hunting and see the sunrise, hear the birds sing, the wind blowing the leaves, and think, “This is beautiful.” He is the one who can see a painting, hear a piece of music, see a well done film, or read a piece of writing and say, “That was creatively put together to communicate meaning.” He is the one who can look at his wife, all decked out for a date, and truly appreciate what she has done with hair, makeup, and dress.

What the Lover Does
The lover extends compassion, mercy, and patience. He is the one who can see a person in need and feel what they feel, and act in whatever capacity he is able to help. He is the one who hears of a petty wrong done against him and rise above his petty desire for revenge and extend mercy and forgiveness. He is the one who can extend patience to the people who push his buttons, irritate him, or have a different set of values they live by.

Of course, we can’t speak of the lover and be silent on romance! The lover is the one who can romance his wife, sweep her off her feet, speak loving encouragement, appreciate her beauty, and love her sexually and non-sexually.

Within great stories the lover is prevalent. Think of characters like William Wallace from Braveheart, Robin Hood, Maximus from The Gladiator, Uncas from Last of the Mohicans, Sam Spade from the Maltese Falcon, Rocky. All of these characters that we can identify with had strength, AND they had heart. They exhibit compassion, fidelity, love, and mercy.

The Lover gives us creativity and passion to appreciate life and God’s creation. The lover helps us appreciate food, art, music, poetry, story, beauty. The Lover gives us an emotional connection to others in deep friendships. The lover character goes far beyond sexuality, although that is included, the Lover is the one who can enjoy life to its fullest extent without being consumed by this enjoyment.

Where the Lover Goes Bad
When the lover goes wrong, he turns into his bipolar shadow, the addict or the calloused. The addict is the lover who has no boundaries, whose fire burns outside of the fireplace and consumes the entire house.

If you grow tomatoes, you know there is a reason that you place cages around the plant. It is not for the restriction of the plant, but for the purpose of helping it bear fruit. The cage lifts the plant off of the ground, keeps the tomatoes off of the ground, gives more of the plant access to sunshine and water, and helps the grower see what fruit is there for consumption. Boundaries do not mean bottling.

The bottled lover will soon turn into the addict, passion unrestrained. He is not strong enough or mature enough to wield the power of passion, so he lets his passion wield him instead. But all this access to unrestrained passion also leaves him calloused. When your skin has prolonged exposure to something, it starts to thicken and toughen for its protection. This is what happens to the addict.

A man who is suffering from calloused passions will notice that he no longer appreciates the sunset like he used to, or he is unable to offer compassion to a hurting individual. Perhaps he is irritable with those who are “beneath him” who try his patience, or he only goes to see a movie for its special effects. Perhaps the calloused lover is no longer able to appreciate the beauty of his wife, and she goes unappreciated, unloved, and unnoticed. This is not an overnight venture, of course, callouses take time to build, and do not show up right away. Often a callus forms over time through much pain and blistering.

We cannot go through life without proper channels for the lover to communicate through. We cannot go through life with unrestrained passion, or bottled up passion. We end up calloused addicts without creativity, no ability to appreciate beauty and life, and no desire to extend compassion.

A Biblical Example:
Jesus: the example of mercy and kindness
It seems so uncomfortable to attribute the title Lover to Jesus, but this is due to our immature and incomplete concepts of Lover. Isn’t it Jesus who tells us the story of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan? He sets the standard for compassion. Isn’t it Jesus who is moved with compassion for Jerusalem and weeps over its pending judgment? Isn’t it Jesus who often retreats to the solitude of the beauty of God’s creation to pray? Whose idea was it to invent romance and sex? Who wrote the steamy Song of Songs book in our Bible?

Isn’t it Jesus who refers to his church as a bride whom he is the bridegroom of, and who he gives his life for? Jesus shows us the ultimate love, mercy, and compassion by walking the road to the cross and enduring death for our sake. Jesus’ self sacrificial love is our prime example of love. We are to love others as we love ourselves. We are to treat others as we would want to be treated. Jesus sets the standard for loving. The Apostle John even states that “God is Love” in his first epistle.

How different would our families be if we practiced a self sacrificial love towards them? How much richer would our life be if we could place boundaries on our passions and give them outlets? What would our life look like if we loved like Jesus?