Reflections on that lovely bright spot

By Mary Vuk Sussman

Love isn’t always falling in love. We know from pop song lyrics that falling in love with love is falling for make-believe. But most of us fall in love (sometimes over and over again Woody Allen style) when we are young (or not so young if we happen to be Woody Allen). Love isn’t necessarily making love, though making war is most always a form of anti-love. It certainly isn’t true that all is fair in love and war. And I suppose most people would agree that the love you make isn’t always equal to the love you take either. Love also means having to say you’re sorry more times than you might ever have imagined.

But let me count the ways.

A mother or father loves a child. If you are lucky, the child loves you and other people plus has interest in and passion and love for any number of other things.

Then there is God’s love for humankind and the human capacity to reciprocate this love. If you are not an atheist, you may believe that God loves you and if everything goes as God intended it, you love God, too. If you are an atheist, it could be possible that God loves you too.

Perhaps an atheist forswears the love of God but loves humankind instead, or perhaps in spite of God, and becomes a secular humanist.

But perhaps not; the Nazis, for example, claimed to be godless. Ditto Stalin, ditto Milosevic, ditto way too many others. There are, of course, innumerable examples of people who aver to be God-loving who are indeed misanthropic. Child molesting ministers come to mind. Jim Jones and bomb-wielding terrorists—who profess a deep and abiding love for God but do not seem to blink at inflicting hundreds, sometimes thousands, of civilian casualties when they enact this love of God with an exploding bomb or car or airplane—also come to mind.

And what does one say about the ability to love of atheists such as Isaac Asimov, Salmon Rushdie, or Joyce Carol Oates? Perhaps something like: ye prolific godless ones, your cups sure do overfloweth with love for the written word.

The love of God or the lack thereof certainly does point to some baffling and perhaps troubling contradictions. It makes for highly charged discussion to say the least.

In a lighter vein, one loves the color blue or BMW sports cars or soft angora sweaters or Ivory soap. One loves to fish or paint with watercolors or read books or play golf. One loves to eat spaghetti and meatballs or perhaps peanut butter cookies. These are a few of my favorite things. You remember? When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I’m feeling sad?

Consider what life would be like if one did not love much of anything at all—not God, not people, not foods, not colors, not objects, not sports, not exercise.

Darby Slick of Jefferson Airplane apparently understood this state of mind.

When the truth is found to be lies
And all the joy within you dies,
Don't you want somebody to love?
Don't you need somebody to love?
Wouldn't you love somebody to love?
You better find somebody to love.

When the garden flowers, baby, are dead, yes,
And your mind, your mind, is so full of red,
Don't you want somebody to love?
Don't you need somebody to love?
Wouldn't you love somebody to love?
You better find somebody to love.

In contrast to Slick’s loveless and joyless “red” world, we move now to a new definition of love. Might not love might be defined as a kind of bright spot of interest or intensity of good feeling, or good will? Love might be that which transforms our often dreary, angry, bitter, frightening, and sometimes boring lives into something less so.

Once, the discoveries of science seemed to threaten people’s love for God; now it seems the reverse is happening. For instance, the American Heart Association reported in 2007 that stroke patients who have strong religious faith have less emotional distress than those without it. It was discovered that distress complicates recovery; likewise, a 2002 study published in the British Medical Journal concerning the resolution of grief in bereavement found that people with no spiritual beliefs had not resolved their grief by 14 months after the death, but people with strong spiritual beliefs had resolved their grief progressively over the same time period.

A study published in Science News in 2008 found that Catholics experienced less pain when they contemplated religious images when they received electric pulses. Professed atheists reported no such pain relief.

One scratches one’s head when confronted with such study results and begins to conclude (personally, quite reluctantly) that a belief in God might be preferable to a distinct lack of such a belief. Perhaps God really is tantamount to love, especially when we think of love as a bright spot of interest or intensity of good feeling, or good will.

Might exercise also be a form a love? It does, after all, brighten your day, take the edge off all your meannesses, make you more alert and energetic. What better respite from dreary, angry, bitter, frightened, and boring? It makes you happier and healthier and reduces morbidity, sort of like the love of God.

A study published in 2007 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) concluded that fat people who exercise, and partake even moderately in the intensity of raised pulse and heavy breathing and agitated endorphins, do not suffer as many of the negative consequences of fatness that their non-exercising fat brethren do—and derive some of the same benefits that their skinny brethren get from exercise. Just 75 minutes a week seems to result in measureable improvements, mostly in the form a reduced waist circumference (which seems to be a risk factor for insulin resistance, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and even mortality associated with excess belly fat). Why not jump rope, make love, hop a bike, take a hike, fat or not?

My conclusion? For maximum benefits, combine the love of God with the love of exercise (and this particularly if you are overweight) and you will live longer and be healthier and happier.

I also take the following to be a corollary: when one’s head is too deep into one’s own self, one’s personal quotient of dreary, angry, bitter, frightened, and boring grows geometrically. If one loves a little more (in whatever form one prefers or in infinite multiplicity), almost miraculously one’s Miserable Quotient (MQ) goes down. It seems that when our MQ goes down, our HHQ (Health and Happiness Quotient) goes up.

Love is whatever lures us out of our prison of self-involvement, self-pity, and self-loathing. Love can make you happy if you are willing to share and care and step outside yourself into a space where you can engage with an other (e.g., divinity, person, interest, activity, imaginative space, dog—even cat) to create a bright spot of interest or intensity of good feeling, or good will, that makes life worth living.

---

Mary Vuk Sussman is a legal assistant specializing in intellectual property law. She is also a freelance writer. Her news and feature articles have appeared in the Bay View Compass, Riverwest Currents, and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She enjoys classic and contemporary movies, history, biblical studies, hiking, and cooking.