Someone recently wrote to me on the theme of feelings. Feelings in the emotional, not tactile sense. She wrote of inadequacy in the expression of feelings for another. She said that she felt not only inadequate, but went so far as to say that it was impossible. At the time I agreed with her. Now, well, now, I'm not so sure. Part of me agrees with her yet there is another part that disagrees, or rather wants to disagree.
Part of the reason I want to disagree is due to poetry. In the crafting of poetry - true, beautiful poetry - there are feelings expressed in ways that succeed in simply, to put it poetically, blowing me away! The height of emotion conveyed in, for example, a sonnet makes me wonder if the poet wasn't on some special wavelength with the ancient Muses.
Another reason for my wish to disagree is because I think that maybe all we do is driven by feelings. These are thoughts that have been on my mind only of late. Due mostly because of my friend's recent letter. She wrote, for example, of feeling "inadequate." Well, isn't this too a feeling?
I mean, everything we do is run on feeling. We do this because we enjoy it. We don't do that because we don't enjoy it. Enjoyment is the feeling that triggers most of our responses in life. Yet there are, I admit, actions we commit without a feeling of enjoyment. In fact, we often have to do things we don't enjoy. These are, if I may argue the point, done on a sense of duty. A feeling of enjoyment and a feeling of responsibility can both guide our actions.
Nevertheless it is difficult to express some of our feelings. Love is, I believe, the one feeling we often find most difficult to express. As Christians we like to tackle the idea of love as a feeling and once in our clutches we flog it to death until it becomes nothing but a matter of the will. Christians have transformed love into a matter of commitment and robbed it of the original God-intended thrill. Either extreme is, of course, dangerous.
Love is often spoken of as "chemistry" between two people. That is a very good description. Love, like chemistry, is something no one really understands. Some people, smart people, can have a real good grasp on understanding some of the issues of chemistry (or love), but no one, I believe, ever really understands it at all. There is also a big difference between love and chemistry. People enjoy love, not many people enjoy chemistry (and I can't quite blame them either).
Could this be then why love is so often associated, at least in the secular realm, with feelings? Feelings do not require explanation. Perhaps, as my friend suggested, it is impossible to express them as well. I've said this before, but I strongly believe it, and will just throw it on the table once again. Love is something that cannot be defined. God is love and neither God nor love can be defined. Yet both can be described. God is described, for example, by His attributes. So with love. Love is described by it's virtues or qualities. Many of these are found in the classic I Corinthians 13 passage. There it speaks of patience, selflessness, graciousness and many other virtues which sum up not a definition but rather a description of love. Thomas Watson said, "Love is the queen of the graces; it outshines all the others, as the sun the lesser planets."
Perhaps then love is indeed something that cannot be expressed. Yet Lewis put it well when he said, "One loves though one hardly knows how. " Though we may not know how to love, or even how to express our love, we still do. We take comfort in knowing this.
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