Love’s passion

[todaysdate]

By Ernesto Tinajero

Can there be love without passion? It’s an important question for Christians because at the heart of God we say there is love. Love gets a bad rap in our culture for being a hippy dream. The reason is because love tends to be thought of as accepting all desires of others without question. Such a view of love leads to little passion. Love is fierce. Love risks the cross. Love is not embracing all we do, but a deep concern for a fully awake living that includes suffering.

Such a passion, the passion of Christ, is very evidence in our dispassionate Christianity that seems concerned only with our behaving well. Passionate love is missing from the world dominated by the celebrity pastors and Christian speakers who dwell on the individual and on conduct. Joel Osteen will never speak about the suffering of the cross because it does not fit in with his “God wants you to be a happy, successful American” narrative. He also lacks the passionate force that great love demands. Jesus goes to the depths of pain and suffering to suffer in commune with us.

When my son lay in recovery, I understood this deep passionate love of Jesus. Jesus was with me and suffered with me, my son, my wife and everyone else who suffers. Love moves to great heights, and will go to the pain of the cross to be with us. Such love forces us to sing and be moved beyond our small worlds to a great world revealed in love. The biblical writers were move to poetry to express such a deep love. Yet, the contemporary church writes little poetry and less love poems. How do we reignite the passion that makes men write love poems?

Death and Passion… Choose.

Sing, soul, sing of the failure’s of Achilles

who chose the sword over love and died

cursing fate, while his wife and child waited.

He chose the way of the gun, sword and death

dreaming only of his own glory. Bodies bloody

before his weapons produce nothing. Life

wasted.

Ah, sing of the passion of the Man/God

in Jerusalem suffering from the gashes of love

on his cross. He awakened men’s senses

to love and living. Drink his living waters

of forgiveness and laugh at the weakness

of those heels demanding violence and

lacking a healing for our sickness

unto death. I sing of my wife in our shared

flesh of matrimony, living and becoming

one in two bounded by the Holy Spirit

of Life. We are called to chose. So sing,

soul sing of the truth of passion. Proclaim

it to the fools who think glory comes

at the end of barrel of a gun. Glory of God

remains in the caress of love forged

through shared suffering. Love, awaken

within us revealing the only battle worthy

of moving blood. Pity Achilles and his men

for their loss, for without love we remain

with Greek Heroes as thugs and brutes. Cain’s

stain remains when we fail to sing of love.

So sing, sing, sing of love in the flesh

with us. Sing of Emmanuel as God

demands.