“[Love] does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.”
- 1 Corinthians 13:6

    Well, it’s Valentine’s Day, and you know what that means.  If you’re married, or in any sort of long-term relationship, by now you’ve probably already been to the card shop, or the flower shop, or the candy shop – or all three – to find that special Valentine’s remembrance for your honey.  (If you haven’t performed that essential errand yet, there’s still time – though I don’t recommend waiting this long, because the store displays are pretty well picked-over by now.)
    Here’s a suggestion especially for the men out there.  It won’t do you much good for this year, but keep it in mind for next.
    Consider buying your wife, girlfriend or significant other a “Mr. Wonderful” talking doll.   You can find him for sale on the Internet.   He’s five inches tall, but he also comes in a jumbo, 12-inch version.  If you’d prefer, you can also choose the convenient Mr. Wonderful talking keychain.  It’s just perfect for the professional woman (or soccer mom) on the go.
    Now, guys, listen up.  I’ll let you in on a little secret.  The really great thing about the Mr. Wonderful doll is that he says the things your lady wants to hear, so you don’t have to!  Just listen to some of the recorded messages Mr. Wonderful will say, when you give him a squeeze:
    “You know, honey, why don't you just relax and let me make dinner tonight.”
    “The ball game isn't really that important, I'd rather spend time with you.”
    “Why don’t we go to the mall, didn’t you want some new shoes?”
    “You know, I think it's really important that we talk about our relationship.”
Here’s my personal favorite:
    “Here, you take the remote, as long as I'm with you, I don’t care what we watch.”
    Now, in the interest of equal time, let me tell all you women out there that Mr. Wonderful also has a sidekick called “Ms. Wonderful.”  Here are some of the phrases programmed into her:
    “Don’t feel bad honey, I forgot it was our Anniversary too!”
    “Don't worry about taking the trash out. I can use the exercise!”
    “Your new secretary is cute! I'll bet she’s smart too!”
    “I’ll finish cleaning out the garage, honey. Your friends are waiting for you to play golf.”
    What makes Mr. and Ms. Wonderful so endearing is that they whisper those sweet nothings we long to hear – whether or not they’re actually true.
    It’s an ever-present temptation, of course, to do just that: to utter the carefully-chosen line, calculated to keep our partner happy – regardless of whether or not it’s true.
    There is – as the apostle Paul says in that famous 13th Chapter of 1 Corinthians, “the love chapter” – “a still more excellent way.”
    ***
    In the midst of all those other virtues belonging to love – patience, kindness, humility and all the rest – Paul throws in a line that doesn’t quite seem to belong.  Not that there’s anything wrong with it; it just seems to belong to a different order than the rest.  Here it is: “[Love] does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.”
    How romantic!  Doesn’t that sound like just the sort of thing to give Judge Judy a tingle at the base of her spine?  As for others outside the legal or law-enforcement professions, we’ll leave that up to individual taste.
    I don’t think, though, that if you go down to the drugstore and rummage through all those pink greeting cards with hearts and flowers on them, you’re likely to find any that sing the praises of “rejoicing in the truth.”  It’s just not that high up on most people’s list of Valentine virtues.  No, leave it up to popular culture to decide, and you’ll get those “sweet nothings” every time.  Whether or not they happen to be true is beside the point!
    Think of the conventional so-called “wisdom” that passes for advice to young people – or older people, if they’re playing the field – when it comes to attracting that special someone. Whole books have been written that are nothing more than anthologies of – for lack of a better term – pickup lines.  I suppose there are people who actually walk into bars and similar places, having memorized a few of someone else’s sweet nothings, expecting them to actually work.
    If they do work, that can create its own set of problems.  For, what if you’re the shy, silent type and you’ve just caught the attention of someone you’re interested in, using somebody else’s snappy witticism?  How long do you think it’s going to take the other person to figure out that you’re not exactly the person you pretend to be?
    Then, there’s the whole industry out there – and it’s a big one – devoted to the creation and maintenance of physical beauty.  Hairdressing, cosmetics, fashion – even the “nip and tuck” of plastic surgery – all are devoted to the goal of accentuating the advantages and covering up the flaws of the bodies God gave us!  There’s a strong element of deception, there, that’s rarely talked about.
    One of the Scottish poet Robert Burns’ most famous poems is about this very thing.  It’s called, of all things, “To a Louse” – and you know, don’t you, that a louse is the singular form of the word “lice”?  The poem displays this subtitle: “On seeing one, on a lady’s bonnet at church.”  So, there’s Robbie Burns, sitting there in the auld kirk, and he sees, crawling across the bonnet of the woman in the pew in front of him, one of those tiny, disgusting, blood-sucking insects.  No doubt it has just emerged from her immaculately-styled hairdo.  Being a poet, of course – a bard, a prophet, a speaker of truth – he’s inspired to write a poem about it.  I may stumble some over the Scots dialect, but bear with me, as I read to you several stanzas of “To a Louse”:

    Ha! whaur ye gaun, ye crowlin ferlie?
    Your impudence protects you sairly;
    I canna say but ye strunt rarely,
    Owre gauze and lace;
    Tho', faith! I fear ye dine but sparely
    On sic a place.

    Ye ugly, creepin, blastit wonner,
    Detested, shunn'd by saunt an' sinner,
    How daur ye set your fit upon her –
    Sae fine a lady?
    Gae somewhere else and seek your dinner
    On some poor body.

    The poet goes on, then, with a few more stanzas – and, believe me, he milks the scene for all its comic potential.  But then he finishes up by directly addressing poor Jeannie, the woman sitting in front of him, with the words he wished he could have said to her at the time, but didn’t have the nerve:

    O Jeany, dinna toss your head,
    An' set your beauties a' abread!
    Ye little ken what cursed speed
    The blastie's makin:
    Thae winks an' finger-ends, I dread,
    Are notice takin.

    The most famous part of the poem is the next – and final – stanza, which has often been quoted.  It’s a little theological reflection on the gifts God gives – or, in the case of some, fails to give.  (The “giftie,” by the way, is the gift-giver – God, in other words.)

    O wad some Power the giftie gie us
    To see oursels as ithers see us!
    It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
    An' foolish notion:
    What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,
    An' ev'n devotion!

    Now, if only poor Jeannie – who had the misfortune of sitting in front of Robbie Burns that Sunday, and having him take in the sight of the louse crawling across her bonnet and preserve it for posterity – had only taken more pains with her personal hygiene than with her powder and makeup and fancy hat!  If she’d paid more attention to the true heart of her beauty than to the mere outward appearance, she would have avoided being made a laughingstock for all time!
    The point is: in love or in anything else, one of the most powerfully attractive features in all the world is this thing called “truth.”  Sure, in trying to present ourselves to people we want to impress, there are all kinds of ways to cover up, deceive and lead astray – whether so-called “beauty aids” or the little lies we may feel tempted to tell about who we are.  The true beauty, though – the truly enduring beauty – is the beauty within.  It’s that spark of the divine that sets us apart as one of God’s creatures, that divine image after which the Creator fashioned us.  Our poor, misguided attempts to recreate and reinvent ourselves can only make us the object of ridicule in the end.
    ***
    “Love does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.”  Well, what does the Bible mean by this first part of the verse, “rejoicing in wrongdoing”?  (Some translations, by the way – like the one on our bulletin cover – say, “does not rejoice in evil,” but it means pretty much the same thing.)
    We can look at that phrase in one of two ways.  The first is to see it as, simply, rejoicing in doing wrong.  I’m talking blatant, obvious, “in broad daylight” sorts of criminal behavior, here.  You can see some of that in systems – such as some areas of our State and local governments, these days – in which corruption is so institutionalized that some people are almost proud of it.  “Why, that’s just the way it’s always been around here, you know,” say the defenders of the system, with a wink.  That’s an example of “rejoicing in wrongdoing.”
    I’m not sure, though, that’s what Paul means as he writes those words.  What I think he’s talking about is the tendency, on the part of some people, to pursue a weird, gossipy fascination with other people who do wrong – especially to watch them get caught and get punished.
    That’s not love, Paul’s saying – rejoicing in the news of the Ponzi-scheme operator who goes to prison, or the poor, drug-addled Hollywood celebrity, whose lurching journey into and out of rehab makes colorful tabloid fodder.  No matter how much such individuals may have hurt others, or may seem to us obnoxious in their behavior, there’s a human tragedy lurking just beneath the surface of their stories.  There’s pain there, and alienation from loved ones, and possibly a very potent, enslaving addiction.  Love does not rejoice in such things.  Love can only deplore the suffering they cause.
    On the contrary, as Paul says, “love rejoices in the truth.”  True love, in the Christian sense, is so much more than a feeling.  It is a moral orientation, a way of positioning ourselves so as to be in synch with God’s will for us and the world.  Love rejoices when an addict admits his or her affliction and begins to practice truth-telling, the first step in the long, hard process of recovery.  Love rejoices when a worker steps forward as a whistleblower, exposing some unjust practice to public scrutiny, even at the cost of his or her career.  Love rejoices when a spouse or close friend no longer needs to pretend about some painful episode in the past, but can trust us to hold that information safe and not use it to injure them further.
    Whenever we fail to value truth as among the highest of ideals, that’s when our most important relationships get into trouble.  Did you know what’s the number-one predictor of divorce in our society?  Several recent studies have confirmed the very same problem as the warning-sign, the canary in the coal mine.  No, it’s not conflict, as you may think at first.  The number-one predictor of divorce is conflict avoidance.
    Every couple has arguments and disagreements.  It’s part and parcel of this complex, tricky, sometimes painful process of two people coming together and merging their lives, fortunes and extended families.  There are going to be times when each partner rubs the other the wrong way.  There are going to be times when the sparks of anger fly.  As long as the couple fights fair, it’s no big deal.  Conflict happens.  We’re only human.
    Where the truly intractable problems are more likely to develop, though, is not in the conflict itself, but when the couple puts huge amounts of energy into denying the conflict even exists.  These aren’t the sort of couple whose arguments are legendary and loud.  These are the couples who live together for years, in apparent harmony, who may even say things like, “We’ve never had a major fight.”  One day, out of the blue, they announce they’re splitting up.  It’s only then that stories start to leak out about problems in the relationship, deeply-entrenched resentments that have been festering for years.  It’s much, much harder for a couple in that kind of conflict-avoiding marriage to make any headway with a marital therapist, because their skills at recognizing and talking about the problem areas are so undeveloped.  That’s because they’ve failed to fully appreciate, in their marriage, how love rejoices in the truth.  Instead, they’ve bought into the misconception that truth is a threat to love, and therefore must be denied and covered up.
    “Never apologize for showing feeling,” said the Victorian-era Prime Minister of England, Benjamin Disraeli.  “When you do so,” he continued, “you apologize for truth.”  What love loves, the apostle Paul is saying, is when you and I can feel safe enough with our intimate partners to share the truth of our deepest feelings and dreams.  In our most committed, covenant relationships we can share who we are, knowing our partner is committed to protecting us from harm.  That’s what God intends for us in our families and in our deepest friendships.  When, in those beautiful old words of Genesis, God says of Adam, “it is not good for man to be alone, I will make partner fit for him,” a major element of that “fit” is truth-keeping and truth-telling.
    So, have fun with Valentine’s Day – with the hearts and flowers and candy and all the rest.  Yet know, as you do so, that this love we celebrate is also a commitment: a commitment to cherish and nurture the truth.

Copyright © 2009, by Carlos E. Wilton. All rights reserved.