Valentines in December: Reflecting on Loving and Being Loved During the Yuletide Season

Instead of listening to Christmas carols during these days of the Yuletide Season, I decided to listen to the collection of my favorite love songs. One of my favorite love songs when I was in my high school years—and still my favorite even up till now—was Love Is All That Matters, especially the version sung by Eric Carmen. For me, I find the message of the song, Love Is All That Matters very deep as it is profoundly beautiful. The message of the song tells us that the experience of loving starts from the realization that we need to overcome our existential loneliness and solitude. Loneliness, the crippling feeling of our alone-ness and the boredom of our existence in facing only our “self” and our self-preoccupations are the crucial feelings surrounding our intense need for the “other” because our finite human situatedness brings us to the emotive realization that our fullness of meaningful human existence is utterly not possible without the “other”—the “other” whom we truly love and cherish.

A beautiful stanza of the song, Love Is All That Matters that I truly find existentially meaningful and spiritually significant is as follows:

“Lost in a dance, waiting for the chance
All I really needed was to love you
Night after night searchin’ for the light,
You saved me, you gave me something I could feel…
Love is all that matters, faithful and forever
Keepin’ us together, love is all we need
Prisoner of illusion, sentence is suspended
Loneliness is ended, love has set me free!”

Since the human person is confronted with these pangs of alone-ness and the angst of solitude, this abysmal pain of his/her soul which we call loneliness made him feel incomplete, inadequate and insufficient in living a life of meaning, and therefore he/she longs for a companionship of hearts. This companionship of hearts is the solution to the existential feeling of separation. This experience of separation is very painful and is the source of melancholy, anguish, angst, pathos and anxiety—and hence the human person seeks for a “significant other” in his/her journey to life.

The next stanza of the song, Love Is All That Matters is beautifully worded as follows:

“Dreams from the past comin’ true at last
Never noticed how my life was changing
Now I can see all that love can be
You saved me, you gave me something that was real
Love is all that matters, faithful and forever
Keepin’ us together, love is all we need
Prisoner of illusion, sentence is suspended
Loneliness is ended, love has set me free!”

From the above lyrics of the song, we can glean the truth that there is a deep need in the human person to overcome existential loneliness and to find wholeness and integration in and with the “other”. Loneliness ends when the loving encounter with the “other” begins, when a person finds his significant “other” or is lovingly found by the “other”. This loving encounter is a meeting of human persons—a meeting of heart facing another heart, of spirit facing the other spirit in each other’s utter openness of authenticity, honesty and faithfulness. The appeal of the “other” is an invitation for the ego to transcend one’s self-absorption and self-importance. The loving appeal of the “other” is a complete break from one’s narcissistic occupation with the self, to face the beauty of the “other” and to freely respond in love to the “other’s appeal”.

The appeal to love and be loved by this significant “other” is self-transforming, life changing and liberating to the ego that is enchained in its own pettiness, caprice and vain self-glory. This loving encounter with the “other” causes a radical shift or exodus from being preoccupied with our “self” to the “other” and effectively solves the problem of our existential loneliness, thus making the experience of love (and of being loved) a life-transforming experience for the person who is in love with the “other”. In the words of the song: “Dreams from the past comin’ true at last/ Never noticed how my life was changing./ Now I can see all that love can be/ You saved me, you gave me something that was real./ Love is all that matters, faithful and forever/ Keepin’ us together, love is all we need/ Prisoner of illusion, sentence is suspended/ Loneliness is ended, love has set me free!”…

“Esse est co-esse!”… “To be is to be with the other”; says the existentialist Gabriel Marcel. We love because there is the presence of an “other” to love… Love can only be true love once it transcends “self” towards the “other”. Genuine love has to be transcendent love—a love that knows no bounds, a love that goes outside of itself towards the “other”. Love that is merely romantic or simply libidinal is constrained and narrowed downwards to the domain of reciprocities, of conditionalities, of business-like transactions. Conditional love is a performative contradiction. Love for it to be true love must be free from the notion of calculated cunningness and wily strategicities brought about by our narcissistic tendency to see love in terms of objectification and commodification—in the manner of bartering and merchandise. True love, however, happens beyond the realm of cunningness, beyond calculatedness and beyond our egotistic scheming to get the other’s applause and approval.

“Amore, ergo sum!”… “I love therefore I am. I can love, therefore I exist”; so said the ethicist Emmanuel Levinas. We know that we are, we know that we exist because we love and we are capable of loving and of being loved. Love from the perspective of self-transcendence has to be incarnational love—a love that goes down to bring the “other” up like what the Divine Messiah did to us unlovable and weak sinners who are not even worthy of His pure Love. Incarnational love means becoming one with the beloved: even if one goes through the mud, muck, pit and abyss just to be with the beloved, even if the lover has to go to hell just for the lover to be able to identify himself with the beloved’s pain and sufferings. For love to be true love, it must enter the level and the extent as to how God Himself loved us—loving us to the point of no reason at all, loving us despite the unreasonableness of it all. Love does not go by mind-games, mind-reading, or by the games of reasonable cleverness. Love goes by the rule of infinite responsibility and response-ability for and in behalf of the “other”, because I will myself to choose the “other” to love, and not because of what I can get from loving the “other”.

And so tonight, I truly find the love song, Love Is All That Matters very relevant to my life as I reflect upon the spiritual significance of the Yuletide Season that we are now entering as we celebrate the Nativity of our Master, Jesus the Messiah… Finally, let it be said that Love is not even fully captured in the words I wrote here—you have to go beyond all the words I said here and to feel what genuine love really is. “The proof of the pudding is in the eating” as that old English proverb aptly says. Love is both the experience and the experiencing. Love is an act of the will—a leap into the realm of the synthesis of Infinite Impossibility and Infinite Possibility: of loving the “other” with no demand at all; like the way God loves us who ourselves cannot even add anything to His glory, honor and power that is already His! This love reaching the stage of “Impossible Possibility” of a love that is “too-good-to-be-real-and-yet-very-Real” is the very way how God Himself loves us… Why did He love us? What did He see in us that made Him love us? He simply loves and loves us even more! Similarly, when we truly say: “I love you” to our significant “other”, it should mean this: “I love you because you are you (despite warts and all that)—and the “you” that you are, is just so lovable to me!”… I seem to hear God saying these words to my soul tonight. How about you? Did you also hear the same words? I pray that you will too!