Improvisation

Reflections on Love Songs and Love

by Fr. Frederick Edlefsen

In the fall of 1971, my first-grade teacher asked the class if anyone knew a Halloween song.  I stood up and improvised a song.  I made up lyrics about ghosts and monsters, with no discernable melody or story line.  Then, I sat down.  Why did I do that?  I don’t know. 

Love can be like that.  Improvised, uncalculated, clumsy, and badly expressed.  It is spontaneously inspired.  We just know we love and want love, whatever that means.   So, we just do it badly and don’t know why, like a made-up Halloween song.  Grade-B movies, ditties, and sappy poems express love badly.  For example, take Terry Jack’s 1974 hit “Seasons in the Sun”.   The lyrics are awful.   As bad as they get.  But, when a guy with sideburns sings them to a potboiler tune, he makes ten-million girls cry.  Love’s impulse often lingers at the doorway of sentimentality.  But sentimentality (like falling in love) is just that – a doorway.  It invites us to an adventure beyond the doorway, into life’s inner rooms. 

Philosopher Josef Pieper defined love as an affirmation that, “it is good you exist for me.”  Pieper highlights two terms: “exist” and “for me”.    Start with “exist”.  Created existence comes from an Uncreated Existence we call “God”.   God created us through, with, and in his “Love”.  We love because we exist through Love.  We can’t help it.  It just is.  

Now consider, “for me”.  Human love cannot be ego-free.  Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31).  There must be some “as yourself” in it.  Unlike God, we are needy because we are created.  Therefore, human love improvises a game of tug-and-pull between love-of-neighbor and love-of-self.    We become more like Christ when, in his grace, we overcome ourselves to love others more.  Love becomes a sacrifice.  With the Holy Spirit’s help, we plunge into Christ’s command: “As I have loved you, so you also should love one another” (John 13: 34).   Sacrifice is implied.  Through the Spirit’s Gifts, love’s improvisation rises to another level.  It becomes chaste, generous, and willing to sacrifice for the good of someone else.  Love says, “Consider someone else, beside yourself.”  “As I have loved you…” (John 13: 34).