It doesn’t take much for me to get cabin fever.
It’s one thing if it’s my choice to stay inside, but too many days of rain, or too many days of a bad back keeping me couch bound, and I start to go a little stir crazy.
Thanks to my back, I’ve spent much of the last four days on the couch. I didn’t even go to church this morning which is never a good thing for my mental and spiritual health. During the past four days, I have maintained some semblance of sanity by sleeping a lot and reading a lot.
In fact I read four books over three days, four young adult books (I’ll always be a teacher in my heart—I’ll always be looking for the next great novel that will inspire my kids). The four books were Unwind by Neal Shusterman, Matched by Ally Condie, Delirium by Lauren Oliver and A Year without Autumn by Liz Kessler.
A Year without Autumn is the story of a girl who manages to travel backward and forward through time thanks a supernatural elevator. It’s a pretty typical coming of age story, how we grow apart from our friends, but it is also a story about fate. How much of our lives is predetermined? Can we change the future?
The other three novels could all be classified as dystopian novels. Dystopian novels present a view of a future that has gone awry. They can be post-apocoalyptic novels like Stephen King’s The Stand, or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. They can be visions of a future where democracy has failed and various dictators or dictatorial groups rule. Think Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
Dystopian novels for teenagers are all the rage right now in the same way that a few years ago, it seemed no books could be published that didn’t have a vampire or werewolf in it.
Two of the novels I just read, Matched and Delirium deal specifically with love. Matched presents a world where your every move is predicted by a computer and a computer decides who you will marry. Again, it asks the question how much control do we have over our lives.
Delirium presents a world where love is considered a disease and, upon turning eighteen, people are cured of this disease through brain surgery. Children are taught that Romeo and Juliet is a cautionary tale. Love can kill. Parts of the Bible are rewritten and, it seems, that any mention of Jesus—as one would expect—has been completely erased.
The plot of the novel follows a girl, weeks away from her “cure,” as she falls in love.
In this Sunday’s gospel reading Matthew 22:34-46, Jesus is once again tested by those pesky Pharisees. “Which commandment is the greatest?” they ask him. "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,” he tells them and then follows that with, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
In her sermon today (which I had to read since I wasn’t there in person), Pastor Debbie touches upon the fact that words like “love” and “heart” are so used and overused and sometimes wrongly used that they have lost the force and the power that Jesus intended them to have when he used them with the Pharisees.
Pastor Debbie points out that Jesus doesn’t ask you to love. He demands it.
These are the two greatest commandments, beautiful in their simplicity and frightful in what they require. No matter what we do in life, if we have any questions as to whether or not we are doing the right thing, we only have to refer back to love. But at the same time, we also don’t have a choice as to when we can follow these commandments. God expects us to follow them at all times, not just when it’s convenient for us.
In that way, love becomes a powerful and dangerous thing, because doing the right thing is not always the popular thing, it’s not always the most comfortable thing. It requires us to be more than we think we can be, more than we want to be. It requires us to be action oriented. People who love do not do so passively.
It is why so many dystopian novels focus on love, focus on squashing it, or controlling it. In Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, a dystopian dictatorship is destroyed simply by stating the word love.
That is the love that Jesus talks about, something so powerful it can change the universe.
