"I don't love you but I always will..."

I have recently fallen in love with The Civil Wars. One guy and one girl. Two voices. Simple music. Hauntingly beautiful harmonies when their voices come together. Specifically I have fallen in love with their song Poison and Wine, whose chorus repeats the phrase, “I don’t love you, but I always will.” Whenever I make people listen to this song (as I tend to do with music I love), I have found there are two types of reactions. There are those who say, “Well, what does that mean? Do they love each other or not? How can you tell? How annoying. That doesn’t make any sense”. There are others (like myself) who find beauty in the song specifically because you don’t know. There is so much to be found in that tension and every time I listen to the song I find myself digging deeper to find some other nuance of the tension that I missed the first time. The joy I find in the song is not in figuring it out or finding the answer but in listening to it again and again and always finding something else that I missed.

I have also found that we as humans do not like to live in tension. We like things to be cut and dry, black and white, easily fitting (or even forced) into one or two boxes that are easily definable (and hence make it easier for us to identify things as either like us or different than us). We like to have pat and dry answers to our questions that make it easier for us to feel in control and powerful. Whenever I find myself wading into the  tension or gray areas of life, my own tendency is to throw myself completely to one extreme or the other so that I don’t have to navigate the muddy waters or feel the complexities anymore. When faced with opposing truths, when defining ourselves, our situations, or others we tend to use the word “or”. I am either this or that. I feel either this way or that way. I believe this or that. But I can’t think, feel or be both because they are opposing truths, ideologies, emotions. How can that be? How do you not love someone knowing you always will?

I think one of the biggest things seminary has taught me is to always ask questions and look at the other side of things when presented with an idea. My response is typically, “Yes, but what about ______? Have you thought about if from this other perspective?” I thought I would come out of seminary with answers and how wrong I was. While there are a few answers I may have gleaned along the way, the richest source of my seminary experience has indeed been learning to live in the tension. Learning to ask questions, live with the questions, even if they don’t make sense. Even if I yearn for simple answers that I can give myself and others. I have found that rarely does a God who is forever moving, creating, living, laughing, and loving work in simple answers. Something tells me that if God had wanted to live a simple life with simple answers, God never would have gotten involved with humanity in the first place. Inserting oneself into a broken and messy world, pretty much means throwing simplicity out the window. Now if we could only learn to get involved in the tension, the brokenness, the messiness, the lack of answers, without being afraid... 

"I beg you… to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answers.” Rainer Maria Rilke