Love burns. That is an image that does not need to be explained. Love —agrees everyone from the social scientists to the poets— is like a fire. Poets and social scientists rarely agree, here they find consensus.
But a love that burns poses a problem. How can flame continue to burn? If it continues won’t it burn-out? And what then becomes of love? Here too it seems many of the social scientists and poets also agree: the thing we call love does not seem to be a thing that can burn forever. Either it burns or it remains. And thus Roland Barthes asks, why it is better to last than to last.
The fires of the initial amorous encounter seem to levy an unpayable bill upon lovers: to simultaneously (1) continue in the burning passion, and (2) last forever. “Love does not settle for the instantaneous —to burn is not enough— love wants to last” Massimo Recalcati observes (18). But we balk and grow terrified at the promise of forever, we doubt if there is enough in us to burn for so long. And so we moderns tend towards the kind of love speech which anticipates its own tragic failure. The promise in Stupid Crazy Love (2011) is that he will “keep on trying”, and the hope of The Office’s Ryan Howard is that “at least for right now” he wants to “be with her forever” (s8, e21):
I'm in love with Kelly Kapoor. And I don't know how I'm gonna feel tomorrow or the next day or the day after that, but I do know that right here, right now, all I can think about is spending the rest of my life with her. Again, that could change.
We doubt love’s ability to outlast the initial heat of romance.
But that is hopelessness and falsehood. Yahweh is a living flame of love (Deut. 4:24; Songs 8:6; 1 Jn. 4:8). And when that living flame of love appears to Moses in the Burning Bush, he marvels at how, “though the bush was on fire it did not burn up” (Ex. 3:2b). The fire of the Love of God can both burn and last forever.
All our loves (romantic, filial, fraternal, civil, etc.) can do likewise if they themselves are set aflame with the love of the Living God which many waters cannot quench.
“I’m struggling to love so-and-so” is to say that “my love is not enough to keep burning”. We need the living flame of Love to keep our fires going, to fan them with the bellows of the Breath of the Spirit, to feed them with the Word, and to touch our lips with the coals from his altar. It is only the fire of the Lamp of Life (Prov. 20:27; Jn 8:12) whose flame can keep our lamps trimmed and burning (Lk. 12:35).