Making love count

A MONTH in which romance comes to the fore. That’s February for you, with its celebration of St Valentine’s Day. Is it signiicant, I wonder, that it’s also the shortest month of the year?

More seriously, I think it’s fair to say that Scots are not exactly renowned for their romantic spirit. Compared to the French or the Italians, we are at the other end of the pendulum swing, away from the lowery, soppy stuf, towards the more ‘earthy’ or practical. “You dancin’?” is not really one of the most poetically framed or inclined questions.

Yet so many come to Scotland to be married. They see the landscape, the castles, the traditions and history as the stuf of fairy tales – absolutely overlowing with romance.

So why are we, as a people, so unromantic? Scots have never been ones for wearing their hearts on their sleeves, or for wearing rose-tinted spectacles. We have tended to go for what’s ‘real’ and as a result, we have seen and said things, as they are. The words we utter may not be the most beautiful, they may not be worth the greetings card industry quoting, but that does not mean that they are not truly meant or sincere.

That said, however, who can beat the words of our own Robert Burns in his song:

My love is like a red, red rose?

What we know though, as Christians, is that love is so much more than the romantic stuf. Love is not simply a feeling or a chemical attraction, it is something which is deliberate, powerful and incredibly strong. Let me quote a few lines from the English poet Godfrey Rust in his poem ‘Welcome to the Real World’. Rust writes:

Love isn’t what you fall in.

It’s what pulls you out

of what you fall in.

Love isn’t a good feeling.

Love is doing good

when you’re feeling bad.

And he adds…

Love is the strongest weapon

known to mankind.

Other weapons blow people up.

Only love puts them back together again.

As we move in these uncertain political times, to what is a diferent future for this nation, we need not only to know what love is, we need to live it.

It is all too easy to go in to our corners and dismiss the other. The love that goes beyond understanding however, calls us to dare to do the more diicult thing and to embrace those with whom we disagree, in order that the love of Christ might continue to work through and between us.

This February let’s make love real and let’s make it count. Let’s deliberately and intentionally go out of our way to make room for the others around us. Let’s refuse to let politics or anything else interrupt the love Christ our Lord, has for us all – the love we’re called to share without limit and without exception.

Life is too short to make enemies of friends. If we do, we may have all eternity to regret it.

The Rt Rev Susan Brown is minister at Dornoch Cathedral and Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 2018/19.

Scots have never been ones for wearing their hearts on their sleeves, or for wearing rose-tinted spectacles. We have tended to go for what’s ‘real’.