A Case for Good Wednesday

Automated system:    Please state when you would like the package redelivered.

Miranda:                      Tuesday.

Automated system:    Did you say [suddenly changing voice] Monday?

Miranda:                      No, who are you?

Automated system:    I’m sorry, we couldn’t identify.

Miranda:                      Tuesday.

Automated system.    I’m sorry. Did you say [changing voice again] Thursday?

Miranda:                      Tuesday. Tuesday. I mean, I literally can’t make it any clearer.

Miranda S2 E6, ‘The Perfect Christmas’ (2010)

 

Calendar, from the Latin Kalends, the name for the first day of the month. Thanks to Stuart Miles at freedigitalphotos.net.

The below is by no means an original theory. Indeed, if I were to present it, or anything similar, as such, I hope that I would be promptly inundated with gentle but firm rebukes that I oughtn’t to think so highly of my own scriptural headcanons considering that all truth pertaining to following God in the present age has already been revealed. On which note, I in seriousness implore you, O Dear and Precious Reader, if you think that I am in any post talking a load of rubbish and that you know better, please don’t allow me to drift onwards in my sorry ignorance; tell me. Granted, it may be that I genuinely completely disagree with you, but equally it may be that I end up being entirely persuaded by your alternative viewpoint, and even thrilled to have such a compelling new set of colours to nail to my metaphorical mast. The latter situation was what occurred when the argument with which this post is concerned was first explained to me, hence my enthusiasm to share said argument with the world (or at least those very few of its inhabitants who enjoy perusing my weekly ramblings), an argument that one might suggest is particularly appropriate for a post published during Easter weekend. For the case I am making is this: Jesus was not crucified on a Friday, but on a Wednesday. I shall now present the evidence.

First, have a peer at Matthew 12:

Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.” But he answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”¹

Skip ahead several chapters and it becomes obvious that what Jesus is predicting here is the time he will spend buried – ‘in the heart of the earth’ – between his death and resurrection. This, he states, will consist of three days and three nights. So let’s do some counting. The women went to the tomb at dawn on the first day of the week (i.e. Sunday) – while it was still dark, John specifies, and I’m quite sure we could spend an entertaining afternoon poring over grammars of Greek and debating how to reconcile the varying time-phrases used by each gospel writer, but the point is that they rocked up at the very start of the day and Jesus had already been raised.² So he must have been raised during Saturday night. Counting backwards, then, that gives us Saturday day, Friday night, Friday day, Thursday night, Thursday day, Wednesday night – and that’s the requisite three days and three nights during which Jesus was ‘in the heart of the earth’, meaning he died and was buried on a Wednesday. I mean, that’s just maths, right? And so if we’re going to affirm that when Jesus said something, he meant it, Good Friday is simply a non-starter.

Now, I’m entirely aware that some people would argue to the contrary, claiming that, in ancient Jewish thought, any part of a day or a night could be counted as a whole day and night, and so, in view of the fact that a day was considered to begin when it got dark, Jesus was crucified on a Friday, entombed for a short chunk of that Friday before Shabbat began at sunset, then remained in the tomb for the whole of Saturday and a decent proportion of Sunday, albeit all of it nocturnal – three days and nights. Such an argument is not entirely without justification: a subscriber to it might cite, for instance, the third section of the ninth chapter of Tractate Shabbat in the Talmud Yerushalmi (a collection of various levels of scriptural commentary compiled in Jerusalem), wherein is a gemara that includes the following statement: “Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah says a day and a night are a period of time, and a part of a period of time is as its whole.”³

Personally, though, I don’t really buy that. For a start, I don’t see that there is sufficient evidence to consider this part-of-a-day-as-its-whole idea as representing a turn of phrase so well established and ubiquitous that we can reassess the meaning of Jesus’ words according to it, because frankly, any approach to Jesus’ words that bustles in declaring that he didn’t literally mean what it very much looks as if he meant, on the grounds of Historical Context and Common Idiom and so forth, makes me immediately suspicious. That isn’t to say that I think the conclusions of such an approach must necessarily be wrong, but they will have to work quite hard to convince me. More to the point, however, it seems highly questionable that a period of less than forty-eight hours would have satisfied the Jewish belief that a corpse couldn’t be considered a hundred per cent dead for a full three days after death. Consider this from Genesis Rabba (‘big Genesis’, basically an exegetical commentary on Genesis) 100:7: “Bar Kappara says the whole strength belonging to mourning is not, except on the third (day); for three days, the soul hovers(?) over the grave; there is hope that it is going to return.”⁴ Or, in very similar terms, from Leviticus Rabba (guess) 18:1: “All of three days the soul flies over the body; there is hope that it is going to return to it.”⁵ All of three days, note. And this tradition wasn’t just groundless superstition, either. This from the beginning of the eighth chapter of a minor tractate of the Babylonian Talmud (a collection of various levels of scriptural commentary compiled in, you guessed it, Babylon) called Ebel Rabbati, also known as Semahoth: “During three days before the interment, experts repair to the cemetery and examine the dead whether they are really dead … It happened that one of the dead was examined (and found alive), and he lived twenty-five years after that; and to another one, that he begat five children before he died.”⁶

In other words, if a corpse got up and started walking about before this three-day deadline, that was totally plausible and with precedent, if a tad unusual. If a corpse got up and started walking about before this three-day deadline, the general consensus would have been that it was never actually a true corpse at all.

And so, if there was even the slightest suspicion that Jesus’ body hadn’t lain there lifeless for the full three days, there would have been ready-made grounds for denying something as utterly unbelievable as a true resurrection. Jesus’ soul was just spending the standard length of time flitting about over its old home, and was coincidentally one of the few that managed to find its way back there. There would have been no need for the chief priests to have made up implausible stories about Jesus’ disciples stealing his body from a sealed and guarded tomb;⁷ they could have claimed, totally credibly, that Jesus had never been totally dead in the first place.

Speaking of the sealed tomb, by the way, do note that Joseph of Arimathea rolled the stone across the entrance, but didn’t seal it, because he was observing the three-day liminal period before Jesus was considered properly dead. The chief priests and Pharisees were the ones who sealed it, because they were determined that Jesus was going to stay in that tomb whatever happened.⁸ (That worked out well for them, didn’t it?)

All right, I’ve made my case. Why exactly does it matter? Well, aside from the sheer peace of mind that comes from a satisfactory explanation of Jesus’ sign-of-Jonah prediction, it matters because it matters that Jesus really was a hundred per cent dead – otherwise, there can have been no real resurrection. And if there was no resurrection, then we, adelphoi, have nothing. There is no precedent for our own transition from death to life. Our faith is futile and we are still in our sins,⁹ because our spirits have not been made alive and we have no prospect of living beyond physical death. The Christian life is a lot of trouble for nothing and we might as well all pack up and go home.

But because Jesus really was dead, it is demonstrated that God can and will bring genuine life in place of genuine death. Because he took the full extent of the punishment, namely death, that we deserved, we can be confident that we will share in his reward of neverending life. Because he who has life in himself became subject to death, he broke its power over us forever. Because he descended to the dead, he opened up the way for all the faithful to enter the presence of God. Because he really died, we are able to really live.

And so a Good Wednesday it really was.

Footnotes

¹ Whole chapter for you: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+12&version=ESVUK.

² You’re looking at Matthew 28, Mark 16 (if you’re a Trinitarian), Luke 24, and John 20. Why not kick off with the Matthew? https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+28&version=ESVUK.

³ My own translation; I accessed the original text here: http://www.mechon-mamre.org/b/r/r2109.htm.

⁴ Again, my own (fairly clunky) translation, which is why there’s that question mark hanging out after the verb, because I just can’t figure out which verb it is, though my working theory is some kind of third-person feminine (to agree with ‘soul’) imperfect from an irregular root with a bet and an aleph in it. So I just translated it as something similar to the equivalent word in the next quotation. I am sorry I couldn’t do a better job, but at the same time I don’t think this one uncertainty impinges much on my overall point. You can get the text here, https://www.sefaria.org/Bereishit_Rabbah.100?lang=bi, if by any chance you fancy a go a besting my translation.

⁵ There is, with this quotation as well as the last, potentially plenty more of relevance either side of the short phrase given, but I just took what I needed and left. Again, original text available here: https://www.sefaria.org/Vayikra_Rabbah.18?lang=bi.

⁶ Someone had already translated this one, much to my joy and relief: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/minor-tractate-ebel-rabbati-chapter-8.

⁷ As they are recorded to have done in Matthew 28 (link in footnote 2).

⁸ Check out the end of Matthew 27: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+27&version=ESVUK.

⁹ I here reference 1 Corinthians 15, which is one of my favourite chapters ever: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+cor+15&version=ESVUK.

A Fearsome Thing

“You really aren’t afraid, are you?

‘No,’ Conor said. ‘Not of you, anyway.’”

Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls (2011) ¹

The first chapter of A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness (based on an idea by Siobhan Dowd)² introduces us to two characters: a boy called Conor and the yew tree he can see from his bedroom window – or, more specifically, the monster that the yew tree he can see from his bedroom window becomes.

 

Ness, Patrick, A Monster Calls (London: Walker Books, 2011).

I have come to get you, Conor O’Malley,³ the monster said, pushing against the house, shaking the pictures off Conor’s wall, sending books and electronic gadgets and an old stuffed toy rhino tumbling to the floor.

A monster, Conor thought. A real, honest-to-goodness monster. In real, waking life. Not in a dream, but here, at his window.

Come to get him.

But Conor didn’t run.

In fact, he found he wasn’t even frightened.

All he could feel, all he had felt since the monster revealed itself, was a growing disappointment.

Because this wasn’t the monster he was expecting.

“So come and get me then,” he said.

Conor isn’t scared of the monster that might or might not be a dream. He is, on the other hand, extraordinarily scared of the nightmare he has on a regular basis that’s definitely a dream. This from a bit later on:

“Can’t you just leave me alone?”

The monster shook its head, but not in answer to Conor’s question. It is most unusual, it said. Nothing I do seems to make you frightened of me.

“You’re just a tree,” Conor said, and there was no other way he could think about it…

And you have worse things to be frightened of, said the monster, but not as a question.

Conor looked at the ground, then up at the moon, anywhere but the monster’s eyes. The nightmare feeling was rising in him, turning everything around him to darkness, making everything seem heavy and impossible, like [sic] he’d been asked to lift a mountain with his bare hands and no one would let him leave until he did.

Page after page, chapter after chapter, we’re not told what the nightmare really is. That said, we get hints and beginnings, and, whatever else is going on in the story, it looms ever large in the corner. We can be pretty sure it has something to do with Conor’s mum, who is embroiled in a lengthy and wearisome battle with cancer, and maybe people with more of a knack for these things than I have would consider its more specific contents readily deducible from the concerns and emphases of the plotline – but the narrative is as reluctant as its protagonist to actually acknowledge, confront, and expose the nightmare, even as it is as enslaved as him to its dark and heavy presence. I emphasise this point because I am about to spoil what the nightmare is, and if you haven’t yet read the book, you might like to leave the rest of this post until you have done, so that the ending, when you get to it, might be as compelling for you as it was for me.

In the nightmare, Conor’s mum is pulled over a cliff-edge by ‘a cloud of burning darkness’. Conor grabs hold of her as she falls, becoming her sole anchor to the ground, but finds it impossible to pull her back up and increasingly unbearable to keep holding onto her.

This was the nightmare. This was the nightmare that woke him up screaming every night. This was it happening, right now, right here.

He was on the cliff edge, bracing himself, holding onto his mother’s hands with all his strength, trying to keep her from being pulled down into the blackness, pulled down by the creature below the cliff.

Who [sic] he could see all of now.

The real monster, the one he was properly afraid of, the one he’d expected to see when the yew tree first showed up, the real, nightmare monster, formed of cloud and ash and dark flames, but with real muscle, real strength, real red eyes that glared back at him and flashing teeth that would eat his mother alive. I’ve seen worse, Conor had told the yew tree that first night.

And here was the worse thing.

The worse thing is this: Conor lets his mum go. He tries to tell himself that she fell, that he was physically incapable of holding her any longer, but the yew-tree monster sets him straight, repeating again and again: you let her go. For a good while Conor refuses to admit it, can’t bear even to entertain the merest shadow of the notion that he wanted his mum to fall, but eventually he gives in:

“I can’t stand it any more!” he cried out as the fire raged around him. “I can’t stand knowing that she’ll go! I just want it to be over! I just want it to be finished!”

And then the fire ate the world, wiping away everything, wiping him away with it.

He welcomed it with relief, because it was, at last, the punishment he deserved.

Conor isn’t scared of the yew-tree monster’s threats to eat him alive. He isn’t even scared of the nightmare’s fire that consumes the whole world. What he’s scared of is admitting that there is part of him that wants his mother to die. He’s scared that those secret yearnings harboured by his heart which he deems bad and wrong and shameful will be exposed. He’s scared of the truth about himself, the truth on whose account he understands himself to stand guilty and deserving of punishment, and of that truth becoming known. Only what threatens to expose that truth, consequently, is able to hold real power over him.

 

The monster is, after all, only a yew tree.

I think we’re all rather like that. Compare, if you will, the following chunk of the book of Isaiah:

In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”⁴

The Lord is much – infinitely – bigger and more powerful and more terrifying than any monster, real or dreamt. Nonetheless, note what it is specifically that Isaiah’s distressed about: he is of unclean lips, and yet his eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts, who is not just holy, but holy holy holy (a cameo there from our favourite Hebrew poetic technique of repetition for emphasis). He’s in the presence of one who knows the truth about him and all that’s bad and wrong and shameful in him and what he says, and whose moral inscrutability and cosmic sovereignty qualify him to sentence Isaiah to whatever punishment he deems fit. And he is, rightly, terrified: “Woe is me! For I am lost.”

There are some scary things out there. There are all kinds of monsters, most of them not formed from yew trees. But the most fearsome thing of all is to have the truth about oneself, the despicable sentiments one holds and expresses, exposed; and, because it is the truth, to be unable to deny it; and so to stand condemned on its account. Conor and Isaiah both get this.

The yew-tree monster knew the truth about Conor. It could have punished him for it – earlier in the novel it told him a couple of different stories about how it had wrought judgement on the deserving in various ways – and in fact Conor expects it to punish him for it. All through the novel he has been expecting some kind of punishment that never seems to arrive. But what actually happens is that after the firestorm, when Conor wakes up unexpectedly alive, the monster’s first concern is to comfort him: his secret yearning, it reassures him, is only one of a million conflicting desires at the core of his being; it is motivated by nothing other than the natural-as-anything desire for an end to his own pain; and it has absolutely zero to do with what will actually happen to his mum. Conor cannot, in other words, be blamed for what happens to his mum; it is established that he is not guilty of doing her harm.

What happens to Isaiah next is a bit different.

Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”

Both Conor and Isaiah are established as being not guilty, but whereas in Conor’s case it was because he was never really guilty in the first place, Isaiah’s guilt, on the other hand, is acknowledged as very much real – and then dealt with. It is taken away and atoned for. The truth of what Isaiah was like coloured him guilty, and it would have been perfectly fair and right and sensible for God to have condemned him, but instead, he chose to change the truth of what Isaiah was like so that he didn’t have to be condemned.

The same is true of all of us who have placed our trust in Jesus’ atonement for our guilt made at the cross. Sure, we’re still riddled with wrongdoing in our earthly selves, in ‘the flesh’, but the real truth of who we are is no longer that we are guilty, but that we possess Jesus’ own righteousness exactly as if it were our own. And, by way of consequence, we never have to be afraid of standing condemned by the truth about ourselves. No accuser has any truthful evidence to bring against us. The fear that drove Conor’s nightmare, the fear that enslaved him by night and lurked in the shadows of his waking mind, can hold no power over us: there is – not because we are good but because God is merciful – no longer anything wrong in us to be exposed.

Let that sink in a moment. That’s massive.

We’re set free from the most fearsome fear there is, the fear that the truth of who we are will be exposed and we will stand condemned on account of it, the fear, in other words, of God’s righteous judgement on wrongdoers. And consequently, we’re able to exercise a better fear: a right, good, beautiful awe of who God is and what he’s done. Isn’t there, after all, something thoroughly magnificent and awe-inspiring and, yes, fearsome about a love so absolute it would give up everything for the sake of atoning for the guilty?

If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,

O Lord, who could stand?

But with you there is forgiveness,

that you may be feared.⁵

Footnotes 

¹ A film adaptation was also released last year. I haven’t seen it and so can’t tell you whether it’s any good, but the trailer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2Xbo-irtBA, looks fairly promising. 

² I was given the book by a friend some time ago but only got round to reading it recently. Sincere thanks to said friend for the gift: this book is beautiful and well worth getting hold of: http://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Patrick-Ness/A-Monster-Calls/16537257. 

³ In the text of the novel, the monster’s words are italicised rather than emboldened, but because I put the entire quotation in italics, I thought bold would be better than a reversion to normal type (for so blatantly abnormal a character). These kinds of decisions occupy far too much of my brain… 

⁴ Whole chapter for you: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+6&version=ESVUK. 

⁵ This is a brief and exquisite psalm that is really, really worth the very little time it will take you to read it: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+130&version=ESVUK.

The Trouble with Romance's Monopoly on the Vocabulary of Affection

“I definitely have strong feelings for you. I just haven’t decided if they’re positive or negative yet.”

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (2010)

It occurs to me that the trouble, as it so often does, really comes down to the English language. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start, as per the usual, by sketching out an example from the world of fiction.

Apparently the heart symbol has now made it into the Oxford dictionary, which I suppose makes it the first official logogram in the English language.

When Marnie Was There is the most recent product of that greenhouse of creative brilliance that is Studio Ghibli, and a definite contender for my favourite of all the studio’s films.¹ I first saw it last term at my university’s campus cinema,² and discovered that one of the benefits of going to the cinema alone is the opportunity to eavesdrop, quite accidentally of course, on other people’s conversations about the film as they assemble their possessions and leave the auditorium. In this case, I caught a snatch of someone’s comment that she enjoyed the film, but would have preferred it if her fellow cinemagoers had managed to refrain from sniggering at what she termed, as I recall, the ‘lesbian overtones’ present in the dialogue.

Now, I might be wrong, but I’m not sure there actually are any intended lesbian overtones in When Marnie Was There. I think it is a film about female friendship, in which protagonist Anna’s interactions with the mysterious Marnie – whose real identity I won’t spoil – are deliberately contrasted with her interactions with other girls her age. Anna’s extreme shyness and insecurity are painted very empathically indeed, and it makes perfect sense that she needs the deliberate slow pace, the exclusivity, and the lack of pressure from external sources that her relationship with Marnie entails in order to learn how to do this whole friendship thing, whereas her more ordinary peers, while well-meaning, would have never offered her the space she needed to initially emerge from her shell. But all that said, I can definitely see why other people would conclude that there are lesbian overtones in the film, and I won’t claim that the notion didn’t cross my mind while I was watching it.

When they first meet, Anna tells Marnie that she had dreams about a girl just like her. Later, Marnie tells Anna that she is her ‘precious secret’ and beswears her never to tell anyone else about their friendship. Marnie teaches Anna to row and to dance and I could see how one might easily read something romantic into both scenes. And on top of all that, the two of them end up boldly confessing their love for one another more than once. “I love you more than any girl I’ve ever known,” is the line on one such occasion, if I remember rightly.

Now, there is nothing inherent within that statement that specifies that this relationship is a romantic one. We all know that ‘love’ has many shades of meaning. But it just sounds romantic, doesn’t it? Somehow it just pushes those buttons. I have, unfortunately, no idea how the original Japanese script and the way it would be most readily perceived among native speakers compare, but I’d hazard that the translators who worked on the English version may have had a pretty tough job trying to render the dialogue in a manner both accurate and not overly romanticky – because pretty much every expression of earnest affection that exists in English lends itself to a romantic interpretation.

English-speakers make a huge deal out of the significance of the phrase ‘I love you’; its being said is seen as constituting a seismic levelling-up of a romantic relationship, as we all know from such beloved sitcoms as Miranda and The Big Bang Theory.³ Even the milder ‘I like you’ has romantic connotations, hence all those rather amusing ‘well, yes, I like you, but I don’t like you’ scenes (there’s a good one in Leonardo, for which see below), and the introduction of the term ‘like like’ as opposed to just ‘like’. And again, even the arguably neutral ‘I have feelings for you’ never appears outside a romantic context, with the possible exception of that awful line in the first Percy Jackson film that book-Annabeth would never have uttered in a million years.⁴ In short, we just don’t have a vocabulary for expressing love of a non-romantic quality.

And it’s not just deep friendships between peers, like Anna and Marnie’s, that lose out because of this. Consider, for instance, a scene in Leonardo, perhaps my absolute favourite of those brilliant CBBC dramas I’m always going on about,⁵ in which the eponymous hero, a young da Vinci, hears the maestro of the workshop where he is an apprentice, Verocchio, confess to having committed manslaughter in his youth. “What do you think of your precious maestro now?” asks Verocchio, clearly ashamed. Leonardo replies, “It doesn’t change the way I feel.” And again, doesn’t that last line just sound like something someone ought to be saying in a romantic context? But it’s categorically not. This is a deep-seated, important, loving relationship – between a student and his mentor. Where’s our vocabulary for expressing meaningful affection in that context?

Then again, perhaps I’m making this out to be more of an issue than it really is. Perhaps romantic connotations aren’t nearly as ubiquitous in the English language as I’m claiming, and I’m just overly sensitive to the possibility of their presence. Still, in light of my general impermeable obliviousness about romantic matters – “So you know X and Y are a couple…” / “No! I had literally no idea!” – I have to say I think it rather unlikely. Plus, I did start this post with an example of someone other than myself reading romantic connotations into something. And also, Ed Shaw claims pretty much the same thing in the fifth chapter of his quite excellent book The Plausibility Problem.⁶ Having identified ‘sex is where true intimacy is found’ as a misconception held by many in the Church as well as in wider society, he quotes the following verse from King David’s lament for Jonathan after the latter is killed in battle:
“I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan;
very pleasant have you been to me;
your love to me was extraordinary,
surpassing the love of women.”⁷ 
He then comments as follows:
“Today it seems impossible for anyone to read this song without thinking that David and Jonathan must have enjoyed a sexual relationship. Didn’t you find yourself quickly sniffing out something homoerotic about them? Off the back of this one verse, some have even claimed biblical approval of gay relationships – all because David says Jonathan’s love for him was better than a woman’s. We just can’t stop ourselves.”
I’ll stop quoting there, though I’d very much encourage you to go away and get hold of the book and read the rest of it for yourself. Shaw goes on to argue that, since everybody needs intimacy, we need to cultivate intimate friendships of a non-romantic, non-sexual nature, otherwise we get that misconception in our heads that a romantic, sexual relationship is the only possible site of satisfaction of this need of ours – which isn’t any more helpful for people who are in such a relationship than for people who aren’t.

And I think that the matter of vocabulary, the monopoly that romantic (and so implicitly sexual) love holds over all verbal expressions of heartfelt affection, allowing other forms of love mere crumbs, makes no negligible contribution to this over-exaltation of romantic love as the only kind that really matters. If romance is allowed to hoard for herself the vocabulary of true affection, isn’t the inevitable result that we start to think that she is the only place where true affection can actually be found? If any earnest confession of feelings of love is automatically seen as carrying romantic implications, isn’t the inevitable result that other forms of love cease to be recognised as important?

The main character of a very enjoyable novel I once read⁸ – an alien living on earth and pretending to be human, and incapable of experiencing romantic love – puts it like this: “I hate it when people talk like friendship is less than other kinds of – as though it’s some sort of runner-up prize for people who can’t have sex. I had a boyfriend once, but I never liked being with him the way I like being with you … You’re one of the best friends I’ve ever had, Milo. And that is everything to me.”

On one level, look how hard she has to work to assemble a sentence that communicates to Milo how important he is to her without leaving space for hints at the romance she knows can never happen between them. Even ‘I never liked being with him the way I like being with you’ would sound romantic – wouldn’t it? – if it weren’t so determinedly sandwiched between a closing off of romantic possibilities. But on another level, isn’t the state of affairs she describes, where non-romantic forms of love are considered ‘less than’ options, consolation prizes for those who can’t manage to attain to the best thing, as accurate as it is saddening? I’m not saying that vocabulary is the only or even the primary factor responsible for fostering such a state of affairs, but it is surely a factor.

All right, so I’ve made my point: seeing romantic connotations in every verbal expression of love, and thus pretty much excluding all forms of love except romance from the opportunity to be verbally expressed, unavoidably contributes to an undervaluation of these other forms of love, a lack of recognition of them, and so a spurning of everything they have to offer in favour of harmfully excessive exaltation of romantic love. What exactly am I suggesting we do about it?

Well, I suppose the most obvious thing to suggest is that we start trying to reclaim the vocabulary of love for use in non-romantic contexts. I feel I should make clear that this is very much an exhortation from the gutter rather than a helping hand held down from a position of superiority: I am as awkwardly British as anybody, and telling people I care about them doesn’t come easily to me in any circumstance, let alone in a fashion deliberately designed to overstep social boundaries. If I am going to be a part of my proposed revolution, I am going to need a lot of help. But then again, so, I imagine, are some of you; and I know how much it has meant to me when a friend has signed off a letter with ‘I love you very much’, or included ‘you are a treasure and a blessing’ in a Christmas-wishes text; and, from little instances like these, I am, baby-step by baby-step, learning; and I state my humble intention, in light of what I’ve said, to try. 

Footnotes 

¹ Fancy a trailer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WASWpDAFOe4. 

² Because I never pass up an opportunity to plug Campus Cinema: http://campuscinema.co.uk/. 

³ I talk about the relevant Miranda episode in ‘Thoughts on Love 2: Luvvou’, under ‘2015’ and ‘October’ in the box on the right. The Big Bang Theory one I’m thinking of is S3 E19, ‘The Wheaton Recurrence’. I’m sure you can think of your own examples; these were just the first couple that came to mind in my case. 

⁴ Seriously, I know the book’s pretty much always better than the film, but in the case of Percy Jackson this is the case to a quite ludicrous extent. Here’s some very stylish artwork depicting a number of the key characters, http://rickriordan.com/characters/, because why not. 

⁵ Aw, just watching the trailer made me really happy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0VSpmyy4UM. Shame it only got two series, but better that it go out on a high than suffer a slow and painful retreat into lame mediocrity. Like some series I could mention. Ahem. 

⁶ Well argued and much needed: https://www.thegoodbook.co.uk/the-plausibility-problem. 

⁷ Here’s the whole chapter, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+sam+1&version=ESVUK, but if you’re unfamiliar with the story of David and Jonathan, aka Greatest Bromance Ever, you should work through 1 Samuel first for added emotional impact. 

⁸ The novel in question was Quicksilver by R. J. Anderson, a sequel of sorts to Ultraviolet but probably my favourite of the two: http://www.rj-anderson.com/book/quicksilver/.