"There is a pair of shoes love wears and the coming
is a mystery."
-Carl Sandburg

Religions, at their cores, are love stories. This is such a simple thing to say that I will lose some scholarly street cred for saying it. After all, religions are so complicated, internally diverse, impossible to essentialize, embedded in cultures, connected to political, social and economic spheres, etc.... right? In fact, what we can't really nail down about any particular religion is endless.

But what I keep returning to the more I study and teach about religion, is that within each major religious tradition, you will find an opportunity to grapple intensely with the concept of love. Devotion, in whatever form, is to participate in a love unfolding.

I am really interested in the eternal/ephemeral duality that the divine is portrayed as having in multiple traditions, and will take up this topic more in-depth in a future post. Mystics are especially attuned to this duality and experiencing and seeking the love of the divine, often at great peril to their own psychological and emotional stability. Some traditions, such as Jewish mysticism, hold that getting too near to this esoteric dimension of Divine love can be dangerous.

Love language abounds in the orthodox liturgical traditions of Judaism, Islam, Christianity and Sikhism in expressing the relationship between humans and the divine. Like ancient Egyptian love poetry, the Song of Solomon reflects an oral love poetry tradition in ancient Israel that has been interpreted by both Jewish and Christian theologians as symbolic of the relationship between God and His people, steadfast, but also full of longing:

"All night long on my bed I looked for the one my heart loves; I looked for him but did not find him."

"I slept but my heart was awake. Listen! My lover is knocking: "Open to me, my sister, my darling, my dove, my flawless one. My head is drenched with dew, my hair with the dampness of the night."

Hindus experience the love of the divine gaze while standing in the presence of murtis and performing puja, and have a rich sacred history in which deities are capable of ardent, sexual love. The loving, peaceful gazes of the Buddha and Jainist Tirthamkaras -- not deities, but still arguably dimensions of the sacred -- imbue the spaces of Buddhist and Jain temples with a sense of divine love.

The Qur'an, unlike the Hebrew Bible, is stylistically more like a collection of fervent utterances of the heart, although I am not intending to personify the Muslim concept of Allah, without form and indivisible. Throughout the Muslim world, the Qur'ran (click here to listen) has been thought by many as having a beauty in Arabic that eclipses even the most beautiful of love poems.

Where I want to go with this is that religion in the public sphere and media is most often cast as something that fuels hatred and the ongoing culture wars, between liberals and conservatives in the United States and between the West and the Islamic world. Teachers of religion have an opportunity to present religions, (in all of their complexity, granted), as approachable, despite how alien to a student's own experience -- not to challenge a student's own beliefs, but to promote mutual respect and understanding.

Who doesn't understand the human need for love? When we can approach a topic from something a student understands, rather than just filling them with information, we have a better chance of creating a meaningful learning experience. And when it comes to religion, the world is definitely in need of us doing this work.